Kenya Insights

Tag: China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited

  • “Are They Giving Kickbacks To Government Officials?” The Scandalous Record Behind Kenya’s Most Favoured Chinese Contractor

    “Are They Giving Kickbacks To Government Officials?” The Scandalous Record Behind Kenya’s Most Favoured Chinese Contractor

    It was the kind of question that does not get asked in Kenya’s parliament without reason. During a Public Investments Committee hearing on June 5, 2024, Saboti MP Caleb Amisi turned to officials of China Jiangxi International Company and delivered a question that cut through the usual parliamentary circumspection: ‘Why has one single company been given all these multibillion tenders for these projects? Are there kickbacks being given to government officials?’

    The company’s officials did not answer. The session ended abruptly. The committee noted for the record Jiangxi International Limited Kenya’s inability to provide satisfactory responses. That premature adjournment was itself a statement. When a company that has formally admitted to completing 14 government projects and holding five more cannot explain to Parliament’s watchdog committee why it keeps winning government contracts, the public interest question that MP Amisi raised does not go away by being left unanswered.

    Two days ago, on June 7, 2026, Business Daily reported that the same company had abandoned the Sh19.99 billion Soin-Koru Multipurpose Dam site in Kisumu and Kericho counties, prompting Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu to write in her report on the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority those four devastating words: the contractor is not on site. The dam was supposed to end a sixty-year wait for communities across the Nyando basin. It was a Vision 2030 flagship. It is now another entry in a file of public money collected and public works not delivered.

    That file, assembled for the first time in its entirety here, is staggering. This investigation traces every documented project, every audit flag, every parliamentary exchange and every court judgment that bears China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited’s name. It calculates, to the extent the available record allows, what Kenya has paid and what Kenya has received in return. It asks who in the Kenyan government has been approving these contracts and what oversight was applied before, during and after each award. And it names the accountability actions that must now follow.

    “Why has one single company been given all these multibillion tenders for these projects? Are there kickbacks being given to government officials?” MP Caleb Amisi, Public Investments Committee, June 5, 2024.

    WHO IS CHINA JIANGXI INTERNATIONAL?

    China Jiangxi International Economic and Technical Cooperation Co. Ltd, whose Kenyan subsidiary is registered as China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited, is a state-owned enterprise supervised by the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Jiangxi Province in China. It was established in 1983 with the approval of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. Its parent company has operated in more than 50 countries and regions across Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America. By its own published account, CJIC has delivered over 600 international contracting projects with a total contract value of approximately eight billion US dollars.

    That global scale and state backing are precisely what make its conduct in Kenya so consequential. This is not a fly-by-night local contractor padding invoices on a county road project. This is a firm owned by the Chinese state, headquartered in Nanchang, operating in Kenya through a locally registered subsidiary, collecting tens of billions of shillings in Kenyan public money and deploying the structural advantages of state ownership, diplomatic immunity from normal commercial consequences and institutional permanence to insulate itself from accountability.

    The subsidiary in Kenya has its own Managing Director, identified in parliamentary records as one Jimmy Ji, who has appeared before the Public Investments Committee on multiple occasions and on each occasion left lawmakers more exasperated than reassured. The company also runs private commercial operations in Kenya, including, according to testimony by MP Caleb Amisi before the committee, the construction of luxury apartments in Kilimani in Nairobi and in Kikambala on the Mombasa coast, simultaneously with its public sector contracts. The question that raises is whether the same capacity, management bandwidth and financial resources being deployed on private luxury residential developments should, under the terms of public contracts, be exclusively allocated to delivering government infrastructure.

    THE TAXPAYER’S RUNNING LEDGER: WHAT WAS PROMISED, WHAT WAS DELIVERED, WHAT WAS LOST

    A project-by-project reconstruction of the documented record produces what must be described as an extraordinary pattern of public value destruction. The figures that follow are drawn exclusively from parliamentary records, Auditor-General reports, court judgments and verified media documentation.

    The Hazina Trade Centre, commissioned by the National Social Security Fund in 2013, was originally contracted at Sh6.72 billion for a 36-storey tower that would have been the tallest building in East Africa. The tender awarded to China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited came after a process whose integrity was immediately contested: the company had been disqualified in the first open tender, then challenged the award to Kenyan firm Cementers Limited in court alongside China Wu Yi. The court ruled in the Chinese firms’ favour. NSSF re-advertised the project through a restricted tender. The new tender conditions required bidders to prove completion of two projects of 40 storeys each in the previous five years, a qualification designed, Cementers alleged, to make the field unwinnable for any local company. China Jiangxi won the re-tendered restricted contract.

    At the technical evaluation stage, the company was then permitted by NSSF to adjust its bid price upward by Sh115 million to Sh6.72 billion from Sh6.6 billion, enabling it to displace China National Aero Technology whose bid was Sh6.74 billion. The PIC later established that only two companies competed for the Sh6.7 billion restricted tender after the manipulation of qualification thresholds had thinned the field. This is not competitive procurement. It is procurement theatre staged for the benefit of a predetermined outcome.

    What followed over the next decade comprehensively vindicates the suspicions that surrounded the award. The project was stopped barely two weeks after the 2013 groundbreaking by a court injunction from retail tenant Nakumatt, which disputed construction on its occupied premises. Construction resumed, reached the 15th floor, and then stopped again following a Ministry of Public Works structural assessment that found the existing building’s beams could not safely support more than 25 floors. The scope was reduced from 36 floors to 15, a 58 percent reduction in scope against a 39 percent reduction in price, with no clear paperwork documenting the variation. China Jiangxi then submitted compensation claims of Sh871.7 million for idle time. NSSF paid Sh653.8 million of that claim. The company then filed a demand of Sh6.88 billion in fresh claims through its project managers, which, if honoured, would bring the total cost of a 15-floor building to over Sh13 billion.

    Kiminini MP Chris Wamalwa, during a 2018 PIC inspection of the site, stated the conclusion plainly: “This is pure robbery with violence. I see a conspiracy between NSSF and Jiangxi International to swindle taxpayers billions of shillings.”

    That accusation has never been formally investigated to a conclusion by any prosecutorial authority.

    The Nyayo Estate Embakasi Phase VI project, a Sh2.2 billion contract for 324 housing units awarded in June 2013 with an 18-month completion timeline, produced 44 units. The Auditor-General’s 2019 report warned of the risk of losing Sh215 million in advance payments. By October 2025, the most recent period covered by the latest NSSF audit, works certified at Sh274.7 million had been paid at Sh227.9 million plus a Sh215.5 million mobilisation advance, producing an overpayment of Sh168.8 million. No refund had been made. Twelve years after the contracted completion date, 280 families remain without the housing units their pension contributions funded.

    The Bunge Tower parliamentary office complex, initiated in 2010 for Sh5.89 billion with a 42-month completion window, was delivered in 2024 at a final cost that Senator Samson Cherargei placed at Sh9.6 billion after all cost revisions, financial claims and interest on delayed payments were aggregated. That is a 63 percent cost overrun on a building whose initial budget already represented a then-unprecedented sum of public money. The contract period was extended three times. When MPs finally moved in, Senator Cherargei listed incomplete construction on some floors, a non-functioning lift, offices without windows, poor floor work and lighting systems that did not function. Senator Richard Onyonka confirmed colleagues were complaining that the building had not been finished to tender specifications. Senator Okiya Omtatah subsequently reported cracks appearing in the newly built structure. The Parliamentary Service Commission never published a certificate of completion satisfying the questions raised.

    The Soin-Koru Dam, contracted at Sh19.99 billion in May 2022 with a five-year completion period, is now nearly three years in with no dam built, no Intake Tower B commenced, no river diversion works started, no road pavements begun, no drainage structures laid, no access roads constructed, no water abstraction facilities or hydropower infrastructure commenced and no security installations underway. The only physical output is a spillway at 15 percent completion. The contractor is not on site. Approximately 1,200 displaced families are waiting for infrastructure that does not exist.

    The Umaa Dam in Kitui County, a Sh1.96 billion project assigned to a joint venture including China Jiangxi, also carries Auditor-General delay flags despite the contractor having mobilised to site in January 2024 with a two-year completion mandate.

    “This is pure robbery with violence. I see a conspiracy between NSSF and Jiangxi International to swindle taxpayers billions of shillings.” MP Chris Wamalwa, Public Investments Committee, 2018.

    THE PROCUREMENT MANIPULATION PLAYBOOK

    Reviewing the documented procurement history across China Jiangxi International’s major contracts reveals what can only be described as systematic manipulation of public procurement processes. The Hazina Trade Centre sequence is the most elaborately documented but the pattern repeats.

    At Hazina, the company was disqualified in the initial open competitive tender. Rather than accept that outcome, it challenged the award in court alongside another Chinese firm, not on grounds of procedural irregularity affecting the public interest, but to block a Kenyan competitor from performing a contract it had lawfully won. The court’s ruling forced NSSF to cancel the Cementers award and restart procurement. When the fund re-advertised, the new qualification threshold requiring prior completion of two 40-storey structures effectively locked out every local Kenyan construction company. Only Chinese firms could plausibly have met such a condition. The tender was then run as a restricted process in which only two companies competed, one of which was China Jiangxi, whose bid was subsequently permitted to be adjusted upward before the evaluation was finalised.

    At the Parliament Tower, the procurement attracted a formal challenge from Petu Developers Limited, which alleged the contract award to China Jiangxi breached procurement law and that taxpayers stood to lose Sh245.6 million because a lower-qualifying bidder had been selected over the cheapest compliant tender. The case was eventually settled by withdrawal, clearing the path for China Jiangxi. But the challenge itself was public testimony to the contestability of the award.

    The Soin-Koru award in 2022 has attracted comparatively less scrutiny of its procurement origination despite the company’s fully documented record by that point across Hazina, Embakasi and Bunge Tower. Any due diligence review of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited as a prospective contractor for a Sh19.99 billion flagship water project would have surfaced the Nyayo Estate refusal, the Hazina Trade Centre scale-down and compensation scandal, the Bunge Tower decade of delays and cost overruns, the EACC investigation into the Parliament Tower contract, and the multiple Employment and Labour Relations Court judgments against the company for worker mistreatment. The contract was awarded regardless.

    The question that this pattern raises is not whether the pattern exists. The documented record establishes it beyond reasonable doubt. The question is who within the relevant procuring entities, the National Social Security Fund, the Parliamentary Service Commission and the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority, authorised these awards after reviewing due diligence, and whether the decisions were commercially rational or required external inducement. That is the question that the EACC, the DPP and the PPRA must now formally investigate.

    THE KENHA CONNECTION: A BROADER WARNING

    A parallel parliamentary action, reported on June 8, 2026 and occurring geographically near the Soin-Koru dam, places the China Jiangxi scandal in an even sharper systemic context. The National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Transport and Infrastructure, led by Vice Chairperson Didmus Barasa, issued a formal caution to the Kenya National Highways Authority during an inspection of the Kisumu-Mamboleo-Miwani-Chemelil-Muhoroni road project against the practice of concentrating multiple road contracts in the hands of a single contractor.

    Committee member Samuel Arama articulated the concern directly: giving one contractor many projects will strain them, especially when they are already facing challenges raising funds while awaiting government payments. This is an issue KeNHA can address through its procurement decisions. The committee noted that contractors with multiple simultaneous government contracts are struggling to complete projects due to financial constraints.

    The KeNHA warning, while directed at road contractors generally and not naming China Jiangxi, describes with precision the structural risk that the China Jiangxi portfolio embodies. Officials from China Jiangxi International themselves admitted before the PIC in June 2024 that the company simultaneously held at least five active government contracts, including the Centre for Parliamentary Studies and Training in Karen, while running private luxury residential construction projects in Kilimani and Kikambala. A company running five public contracts worth billions of shillings while simultaneously building private apartments in prime real estate locations is not a company operating with the focused capacity and financial ring-fencing that flagship national infrastructure demands.

    The geographical overlap is also striking. The KeNHA committee inspected the Kisumu-Mamboleo-Miwani road on June 8, one day after Business Daily reported the abandonment of the Soin-Koru dam. Both sites are within the same western Kenya economic corridor. Both represent critical infrastructure for the same communities. Both are flagged for contractor non-performance or systemic risk. The connection is not that China Jiangxi holds the Mamboleo road contract; it does not, that project is split across China Railways No. 10 Engineering Group, Sinohydro and H-Young EA. The connection is systemic: Kenya’s infrastructure delivery is plagued by a pattern in which contractors collect public money across multiple simultaneous contracts, underperform on each, blame government payment delays and leave communities waiting, while accountability mechanisms remain too slow, too deferential and too easily deflected to impose consequences.

    WHAT KENYA HAS ACTUALLY RECEIVED: A VALUE-FOR-MONEY ASSESSMENT

    The public value question is, at its most fundamental, arithmetical: what did Kenya pay for each major China Jiangxi contract, and what did it receive?

    On the Hazina Trade Centre, Kenya through NSSF paid an amount that by 2024 could plausibly exceed Sh5 billion when the original contract payments, the reduced-scope contract sum, the Sh653.8 million idle time compensation and the partial settlement of additional claims are aggregated. What it received was a 15-floor commercial building in a central Nairobi location, incomplete at the time of the most recent audit through June 2025, still without functioning lifts. The building that was supposed to be the tallest in East Africa and a landmark for the fund’s investment strategy is a mid-rise structure that has been under some form of contested construction or claim litigation for over a decade.

    On the Nyayo Estate Embakasi Phase VI, Kenya through NSSF paid approximately Sh443.4 million in mobilisation fees, certified works and an identified overpayment against a Sh2.2 billion contract. It received 44 housing units out of 324 contracted. The cost per unit actually constructed, calculated against total payments made, exceeds Sh10 million. The contract value of the unconstructed 280 units, at the original per-unit implied rate, represents approximately Sh1.9 billion in contracted housing not delivered.

    On Bunge Tower, Kenya through the Parliamentary Service Commission paid approximately Sh9.6 billion in all-in costs against an original Sh5.89 billion contract. It received a parliamentary office block that took 14 years to deliver against a contracted 42 months, that legislators publicly described as incomplete on delivery, whose lifts did not function at handover, whose offices lacked windows and whose structural integrity was raised as a concern by a serving senator within months of occupation. The cost overrun of approximately Sh3.7 billion above original contract value, plus Sh1.1 billion in financial claims and Sh225.2 million in delay interest, represents money Kenya spent on a building it already contractually owned before the claims were lodged.

    On the Soin-Koru Dam, Kenya has paid mobilisation and advance sums whose precise total NWHSA has not publicly disclosed. What it has received, per the Auditor-General’s inspection, is a spillway at 15 percent completion. Everything else on the project specification sheet is at zero. The contractor is absent. The communities that were displaced are waiting.

    Aggregate these figures and the unavoidable conclusion is that China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited has extracted from Kenyan public institutions, between confirmed payments, retained advances, idle time compensation and cost overruns, an amount conservatively estimated at well above Sh15 billion in real cash across the projects reviewed here, while delivering infrastructure whose value, quality and completeness falls dramatically short of contracted requirements. This is not commercial misfortune. It is a systematic extraction pattern executed across multiple client relationships over more than a decade.

    THE WORKERS WHOSE RIGHTS WERE DISCARDED

    Running in parallel with the financial record is an employment record that compounds the accountability indictment. Kenya’s courts contain dozens of judgments involving China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and its various project iterations as respondents in employment disputes filed by workers across multiple sites.

    The Konza Technopolis project, where the company had construction work, generated at least one documented Employment and Labour Relations Court case in 2018 in which a mason employed since July 2016 was summarily dismissed without notice, without a disciplinary hearing and without terminal benefits after a workplace incident involving a Chinese foreman. The claimant testified that he reported to the Labour Department, which wrote to the company demanding payment of terminal benefits, and that the company did not respond. His NSSF dues were paid only after some time had elapsed. He had no written contract of employment.

    This single case reflects a pattern documented across sites from Kisumu to Malindi to Kitale: China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited routinely employed Kenyan workers on verbal or inadequately documented arrangements, paid them irregularly, denied them written termination procedures, failed to remit NSSF contributions on schedule and resisted Labour Department enforcement. The workers who raised these claims were overwhelmingly low-income casual labourers, the most economically vulnerable participants in Kenya’s construction sector, pursuing claims against a state-backed Chinese corporation through years of litigation for amounts measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of shillings. That many of them succeeded in court is a tribute to the Kenyan judiciary. That they had to litigate at all, against a company that has simultaneously collected billions in public contracts, is a reproach to the oversight systems that were supposed to protect them.

    THE EACC AND THE INVESTIGATIONS THAT MUST COME

    The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission’s previous engagement with China Jiangxi International is instructive about both the potential and the limits of existing accountability mechanisms. When the Auditor-General’s 2019-2020 report flagged the Parliament Tower project for slow progress, illegal contract variation exceeding the 25 percent statutory cap, sub-contractor irregularities and a procuring entity without a title deed to its own construction site, the EACC assigned three investigators to visit the site and review the documentation. They collected materials. They monitored the situation.

    No public prosecution or formal determination emerged from that investigation. The EACC’s spokesman at the time confirmed only that the matter was flagged by the Auditor-General and we are monitoring it. Monitoring, in this context, appears to mean watching a pattern unfold while the contractor continues to collect public money and bid for new contracts.

    The EACC must now be required to account for the outcome of its Parliament Tower investigation and to open formal investigations into: the procurement of the Hazina Trade Centre restricted tender including the disqualification challenge, the qualification threshold manipulation and the bid adjustment; the approval of the scope reduction and associated price reduction at Hazina; the authorisation and payment of Sh653.8 million in idle time compensation; the retention of Sh215.5 million in Embakasi mobilisation fees; and the award of the Soin-Koru contract to a company whose documented record of performance failures was entirely available to the procuring entity before the contract was signed.

    The DPP must consider whether the documented conduct, advance payment capture without delivery, refusal to refund after project failure, compensation claims lodged for contractor-attributable delays, scope reductions without proportionate price reductions, and the deliberate obstruction of parliamentary oversight through inadequate testimony, constitutes conduct warranting criminal investigation under the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act and the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act.

    THE DIPLOMATIC DIMENSION KENYA HAS REFUSED TO CONFRONT

    No accountability analysis of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited is complete without acknowledging its nature as a state-owned enterprise of the People’s Republic of China. The parent company, CJIC, is supervised by the Jiangxi Province State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. It was established with the approval of the State Council of China. Its operations are not private commercial activity independent of Chinese state policy. They are extensions of that state’s overseas economic engagement.

    China has invested heavily in presenting its Africa engagement as a partnership framework built on mutual benefit, non-interference and South-South solidarity. Those claims are tested by the conduct of its state-owned enterprises on the ground. When a state-owned Chinese construction company abandons a Sh20 billion dam that Kenyan communities have waited for since the 1960s, refuses to refund advance payments it has held for over a decade, delivers a parliamentary office building after 14 years at 63 percent cost overrun, and sends its managing director to Parliament to present documents that legislators publicly call jokers, the gap between the partnership rhetoric and the operational reality is not a marginal discrepancy. It is a systematic mismatch.

    Kenya’s government has been reluctant to escalate complaints about Chinese contractor behaviour to the diplomatic level, partly out of dependency on Chinese financing for infrastructure, partly out of the informal protocol that governs bilateral relations and partly, perhaps, because some of the beneficiaries of the procurement arrangements that favour these companies have an interest in not having them examined too closely. That reluctance must end. The Kenyan government has both the right and the obligation to formally represent to the Chinese Embassy and to the relevant Chinese state authorities that the conduct of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited across its portfolio of public contracts constitutes a breach of the standards that bilateral partnership implies.

    ACCOUNTABILITY ACTIONS: A CHECKLIST FOR PARLIAMENT, THE PPRA, THE EACC AND THE TREASURY

    The Parliamentary Service Commission, the NSSF Board and the NWHSA Board must each immediately disclose the full financial settlement of every contract with China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited: total amounts paid, total amounts certified, total amounts in dispute, status of performance bonds and whether bond triggers have been evaluated.

    The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority must initiate a formal review of every competitive and restricted procurement process in which China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited was awarded a public contract, beginning with the Hazina Trade Centre restricted tender of 2013 and extending through the Soin-Koru award of 2022. The review must determine whether the procurement processes complied with the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act, whether any Kenyan public official was involved in manipulating qualification thresholds, restricting competition or approving irregular bid adjustments, and whether the company should be debarred from future public tenders pending the outcome.

    The PPRA must additionally consider whether the known conflict between the company’s simultaneous private commercial construction activity and its active public infrastructure contracts represents a violation of contract terms or procurement regulations, and whether capacity declarations made at the time of tender were accurate.

    Performance bonds on the Soin-Koru contract must be assessed for trigger compliance immediately. If trigger conditions are met, the bonds must be called without delay. NWHSA must disclose publicly what bonds are in place, their value and their current status.

    The EACC must be required to provide Parliament with a public update on the status of all investigations involving China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited within thirty days. If investigations were closed without prosecution, the reasons for closure must be published. If investigations are ongoing, the timeline for conclusion must be stated.

    The National Treasury must conduct a government-wide portfolio review of all active contracts with China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and its associated joint venture entities, including the Umaa Dam joint venture and any other engagements not covered in this investigation, and determine the total sum currently held by the company in mobilisation advances, interim certificates and retention payments relative to independently verified physical progress on each contract.

    The Ministry of Foreign Affairs must initiate a formal diplomatic representation to the Chinese Embassy requesting engagement with the parent company’s supervisory authority, the Jiangxi Province SASAC, regarding the documented pattern of performance failure and its impact on Kenya-China infrastructure cooperation credibility.

    CONCLUSION: THE QUESTION THAT WAS ASKED AND NEVER ANSWERED

    MP Caleb Amisi asked the question that needed to be asked. He asked it directly, on the record, before a parliamentary committee, and the company’s officials could not respond. The session was adjourned. The question hung in the air of the committee room and dissipated into institutional silence.

    It has now been two years since that hearing. In the intervening period, China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited has been cited in the Auditor-General’s reports on two separate water infrastructure projects as either absent from the site or significantly behind schedule. The company’s construction of Bunge Tower has drawn complaints of cracks in the structure from a serving senator. Its managing director has appeared before Parliament and generated a formal committee notation of inability to provide satisfactory responses. And the company has done nothing to refund Sh384.3 million in combined identified overpayments and retained mobilisation advances across the Hazina and Embakasi contracts.

    The question MP Amisi asked was not reckless or sensational. It was the question any professional doing due diligence on a public contractor would ask when they discovered that a single company had won 14 government contracts worth tens of billions of shillings across more than a decade while generating an unbroken succession of audit flags, parliamentary investigations, court judgments and abandoned sites. In a transparent, well-governed procurement environment, the answer to that question would be provided voluntarily and proactively, by the public entities that awarded the contracts, in published records that allow citizens to verify the basis for each award.

    No such records have been published. The question remains open. The obligation to answer it does not belong to China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited. It belongs to the Kenyan public officials who authorised every contract this company has held, who signed every payment certificate, who approved every scope variation, who paid every compensation claim and who continued to award new contracts when the existing record demanded scrutiny rather than extension.

    The contractor may be absent from the Soin-Koru dam site. The public officials who put it there are not absent. They are in their offices. They should be summoned.

    DOCUMENTED FINANCIAL EXPOSURE SUMMARY: CHINA JIANGXI INTERNATIONAL KENYA LIMITED

    Project

    Original Contract

    Outcome / Overpayment

    Status

    Hazina Trade Centre (NSSF)

    Sh6.72bn / 36 floors

    15 floors built; Sh653.8m idle claims paid; Sh6.88bn fresh demand lodged; incomplete as at 2025

    Unresolved

    Nyayo Embakasi Phase VI (NSSF)

    Sh2.2bn / 324 units

    44 units built; Sh168.8m overpayment; Sh215.5m advance not refunded

    Unresolved

    Bunge Tower (PSC)

    Sh5.89bn / 42 months

    Sh9.6bn all-in cost; 14 years to deliver; structural complaints on handover

    Occupied; defects disputed

    Soin-Koru Dam (NWHSA)

    Sh19.99bn / 5 years

    15% on spillway only; contractor absent from site; all other works unstarted

    Critical failure

    Umaa Dam (NWHSA)

    Sh1.96bn / 2 years

    Auditor-General delay flags raised

    Under scrutiny
  • VANISHING ACT: How China Jiangxi International Pocketed Billions in Kenyan Public Contracts, Then Walked Away

    VANISHING ACT: How China Jiangxi International Pocketed Billions in Kenyan Public Contracts, Then Walked Away

    On August 27, 2022, the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority handed China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and its parent company, China Jiangxi International Economic and Cooperation Company Ltd, a contract worth Sh19.99 billion to construct the Soin-Koru Multipurpose Dam, a project that communities straddling the Kisumu and Kericho county border had been demanding since the 1960s.

    The contract covered Lot One of the project: the dam component itself, a 54-metre-high zoned earth rock-fill structure that was to store 93.7 million cubic metres of water, irrigate 2,570 hectares of farmland, generate 2.5 megawatts of hydropower and end perennial flooding across the Nyando basin. Construction was to run for five years, concluding in August 2027.

    The contractor received its mobilisation, moved equipment to the site and collected its fees. And then, as Kenya’s Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu would later confirm in an audit report covering the financial year ended June 2025, the contractor simply ceased to exist on the ground.

    “The contractor is not on site,” Gathungu wrote, with the blunt economy of a public servant who has reviewed enough disaster to need few additional words.

    That finding, contained in the official audit report of the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority, is the latest and most damning entry in a documented pattern that spans more than a decade: China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and its parent entity have accumulated some of the most lucrative public construction contracts in Kenya’s history, secured advance payments running into hundreds of millions of shillings per project, delivered work that in several cases falls catastrophically short of contracted scope, refused to refund unearned money, defied parliamentary summons, offered evasive testimony before National Assembly committees and walked away from sites leaving auditors, pensioners and communities to pick up the wreckage.

    This investigation consolidates the full documented record for the first time. Every client of the Kenyan government that is considering engaging China Jiangxi International, and every procurement officer authorising further payments to the company or its joint venture partners, should read what follows.

    “The contractor is not on site.” Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu, June 2025 audit report on the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority.

    THE DAM THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO END A 60-YEAR WAIT

    The Soin-Koru dam sits at the intersection of Kisumu and Kericho counties, at a site along the Koru river that engineers first identified in the 1960s as ideal for a multipurpose water reservoir. More than sixty years of feasibility studies, environmental assessments, displaced hopes and aborted funding cycles passed before the Ruto administration moved the project forward in 2022. The dam was relaunched as one of the government’s flagship water security investments and listed among Vision 2030 infrastructure priorities. It was earmarked as key off-site infrastructure for the planned 1,000-acre Kisumu Special Economic Zone at Miwani. Communities in Kisumu City, Ahero, Chemelil, Miwani, Awasi, Muhoroni, Koitaburot, Koru and Rabuor were told their wait was over.

    Approximately 1,200 residents were displaced from land that would be inundated. They gave up their homes, farms and ancestral grounds on the understanding that construction was imminent and irreversible. Construction activities formally commenced in 2023 following completion of the compensation process.

    Nearly three years into a five-year contract, the physical reality on site is a study in near-total non-performance. The 54-metre dam itself has not been built. Diversion culverts, coffer dams, seepage control works, grouting, diaphragm walls, relief wells and laboratory testing facilities have not been started. Intake Tower B has not begun. River diversion works, road pavements, drainage structures, access roads, water abstraction facilities, hydropower infrastructure and security installations have not commenced. The resident engineer’s offices, laboratory and staff houses remain incomplete.

    The only element that shows any physical activity is a side-channel spillway, comprising a concrete-lined chute and plunge pool, whose progress auditors estimated at approximately 15 percent. A spillway at 15 percent, everything else at zero, and the contractor absent from the site. That is where the flagship dam stands today.

    China Jiangxi did not respond to questions submitted by text message to a company representative. The silence is a characteristic response, consistent with this firm’s approach to accountability across every project examined in this investigation.

    THE ANATOMY OF A BUSINESS MODEL

    To understand the Soin-Koru abandonment, it must be placed in context. China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and its parent, China Jiangxi International Economic and Technical Cooperation Co. Ltd, a state-owned enterprise headquartered in Nanchang in Jiangxi province, China, have operated in Kenya for over a decade. The parent company was founded in 1983, has operated in more than 50 countries across Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America, and by its own account has delivered over 600 international contracting projects with a total contract value of approximately eight billion US dollars. In Kenya, its subsidiary registered as a locally incorporated company and has accumulated at least 14 completed government projects and at minimum five ongoing ones, according to testimony the company itself gave before Parliament’s Public Investments Committee in June 2024.

    That accumulation of public contracts is precisely what raised alarm bells among legislators. Saboti MP Caleb Amisi put the question to company officials with striking directness during the June 2024 sitting of the PIC on Social Services, Administration and Agriculture: why has one single company been given all these multibillion tenders for these projects? Are there kickbacks being given to government officials? The company’s representatives did not provide a satisfactory answer. The session ended with the committee noting Jiangxi International’s inability to respond to the questions asked.

    Reviewing the documented project portfolio reveals a remarkably consistent operational signature. China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited secures contracts through processes that have repeatedly attracted scrutiny, including instances of disqualification followed by re-tendering under modified conditions that favour the company. It collects mobilisation or advance payments. It commences work. It then, at varying rates of speed, either substantially underperforms against contracted scope, allows timelines to collapse, lodges large compensation claims for idle time or variations, reduces scope without proportionate cost reductions, or simply leaves. Throughout, it is resistant to refunding unearned money and strategically evasive when called before accountability forums.

    “Why has one single company been given all these multibillion tenders for these projects? Are there kickbacks being given to government officials?” MP Caleb Amisi, Public Investments Committee, June 2024.

    HAZINA TRADE CENTRE: THE BLUEPRINT FOR EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWED

    The Hazina Trade Centre project, commissioned in 2013, is the foundational case study in China Jiangxi’s Kenyan record. The National Social Security Fund, custodian of the retirement savings of millions of Kenyan workers, selected China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited to transform an existing building in Nairobi’s central business district into a 36-storey commercial tower at a contract value of Sh6.72 billion. The selection process itself was immediately contentious. The firm had initially been disqualified in the first tender. The fund re-advertised the project through a restricted tender floated afresh after the first process was annulled following an appeal by two Chinese firms. Cementers Limited, the company that won the initial tender, later told the PIC that the fund had changed conditions in the new tender to favour Chinese contractors.

    The project lurched forward for years under a cloud of disputes, court challenges and audit queries. Then, with the building at 15 floors, construction stopped. China Jiangxi justified the halt by citing structural concerns about whether the existing building’s foundations could support the full 36-storey height. The scope was formally revised downward to 15 floors and the contract value reduced from Sh6.72 billion to Sh4.1 billion. But as the Auditor-General’s report for the financial years 2019-20 and 2020-21 later revealed, the reduction in scope was 58 percent while the reduction in contract price was only 39 percent. Twenty-one floors removed; Sh2.62 billion off the price. The committee chair MP Emmanuel Wangwe captured the absurdity with precision: what made the construction of 15 floors more expensive than the cost of the initial 21 floors? Even if there were variations, it cannot be 100 percent.

    The damage did not end with the scope reduction. The Auditor-General further revealed that China Jiangxi had submitted compensation claims of Sh871.7 million for idle time attributable to construction stoppages. NSSF paid out Sh653.8 million of that claim. A project delivered at less than half its contracted size, with the client paying hundreds of millions in idle time fees, no clear paperwork justifying the variation, and a contractor whose managing director appeared before Parliament and was described by committee members as presenting documents that were nothing but jokers. When asked whether he was even a genuine company official, Jimmy Ji could not convincingly reassure the lawmakers.

    By the time of PIC hearings in April 2024, it was further revealed that China Jiangxi had demanded an additional Sh6.88 billion from NSSF through its project managers, which, if honoured, would put the cost of building 15 floors at over Sh13 billion, more than double the original contract to build 36. The Department of Public Works, brought in as new project managers, called the claim mind-boggling. As of the most recent audit covering the period through June 2025, work on the building was still incomplete, construction was ongoing on some floors, and the lift did not function.

    NYAYO EMBAKASI: ADVANCE PAYMENT, 44 UNITS, NO REFUND

    The Hazina Trade Centre was not the only NSSF project awarded to China Jiangxi. The fund also gave the company a Sh2.2 billion contract for the construction of 324 housing units at Nyayo Estate, Embakasi Phase VI, to run from June 2, 2013 to November 30, 2014. NSSF advanced the contractor Sh215.5 million in mobilisation fees, secured by a Standard Chartered Bank guarantee. The guarantee expired in September 2015. As at March 2018, four years after the contracted completion date, only 44 of the 324 units had been constructed. Work had stopped. The fund requested the contractor refund the mobilisation advance. China Jiangxi declined.

    The company’s response to the refund demand, as reported before the PIC in 2024, was that repayment would depend on the final settlement of the project account, including completed work, contractual claims and incurred expenses. The most recent audit report covering the period through October 2025 confirms that of the Sh215.5 million mobilisation fee and a further overpayment of Sh168.8 million identified by the auditor against certified works, no refund had been made. Twelve years after the contracted completion date, 280 units remain unbuilt and hundreds of millions remain unreturned. NSSF, the pension fund of ordinary Kenyan workers, continues to carry the loss.

    The same Ernst and Young audit report commissioned by COTU-Kenya in 2016 flagged irregularities in the procurement of the Nyayo project, including the advance payment of Sh215.5 million without NSSF Board approval and procurement of the contractor before access to the plots had been secured.

    BUNGE TOWER: A DECADE, A COST BLOWOUT AND CRACKS IN THE WALLS

    China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited also constructed Bunge Tower, the 26-storey parliamentary office building that sits between Continental House and County Hall adjacent to Parliament in Nairobi. The project was initiated by the Parliamentary Service Commission in 2010 and construction started in March 2014 with a contracted value of Sh5.89 billion and a 42-month completion period, meaning it should have been done by 2017.

    It was not delivered until 2024, a delay of approximately seven years. By the time MPs moved in, the contract value had escalated to Sh7.1 billion, with financial claims attracting an additional Sh1.1 billion and Sh225.2 million in interest on delayed payments. The initial contract period had been extended three times. When MPs finally occupied the building in April 2024, Senator Samson Cherargei reported that construction was still ongoing on some floors, the lift did not work and some offices lacked windows. Other legislators complained of poor ventilation, inadequate natural lighting and erratic mobile phone networks from the 21st floor upward.

    The project had also drawn the attention of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, which sent investigators to the site in 2021 following findings in the Auditor-General’s report for 2019-20. The EACC was interested in, among other concerns, a 27 percent contract variation when the law capped variations at 25 percent, slow progress that had stalled a sub-contractor already paid 70 percent of his sub-contract value, and the fact that 14 sub-contractors had been handed over to China Jiangxi without clear documentation of ownership. The PSC at that point still did not hold a title deed to the land on which the tower stood.

    China Jiangxi had also challenged the award of a Sh700 million interior fitting sub-contract to Nightingale Enterprises Limited, filing a petition to the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board claiming the winning firm had used forged documents. Nightingale was awarded the contract regardless.

    “Jiangxi International Limited Kenya’s inability to provide satisfactory responses led to the premature adjournment of the session.” Public Investments Committee, Parliament of Kenya, June 2024.

    UMAA DAM, KITUI: THE THIRD WATER PROJECT IN TROUBLE

    The Soin-Koru dam is not the only water infrastructure project assigned to China Jiangxi that has attracted audit concerns under the current administration. The Auditor-General has separately flagged delays in the Sh1.96 billion Umaa Dam Water Supply and Irrigation Project in Kitui County, being implemented by a joint venture involving China Jiangxi International Economic and Technical Cooperation Company Ltd and Vanqo Roads and Engineering Ltd. NWHSA contracted the firm to complete the dam, which had first stalled in 2009 following a dispute with the original contractor, at a cost of Sh1.9 billion. The firm moved to site in January 2024 with a two-year completion timeline. That timeline has already been questioned by the auditor. Kitui’s governor had publicly declared the county would not allow the dam to stall again. That declaration now stands as a hostage to fortune.

    THE PATTERN THAT PROCUREMENT OFFICERS MUST RECOGNISE

    A forensic review of the documented record reveals at least six recurring characteristics in China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited’s engagement with Kenyan public contracts.

    The first is contested procurement origin. The Hazina Trade Centre was awarded through a restricted tender after the company was disqualified in the first open process and the tender re-advertised. The Parliament Tower contract attracted a tender dispute petition by a competitor claiming the procurement was in breach of the law and that it favoured China Jiangxi over the lowest bidder by Sh245.6 million. These are not one-off anomalies.

    The second is advance payment capture. Mobilisation or advance payments are collected at the outset of each contract. When projects stall, those advances are not returned. The Nyayo Estate Embakasi case is the starkest illustration: Sh215.5 million advanced, work at 13.6 percent of contracted units after the completion deadline passed, refund refused for over a decade and counting.

    The third is scope reduction without proportionate price reduction. At Hazina Trade Centre, 58 percent of the floors were removed but only 39 percent of the contract price was reduced. The contractor then submitted compensation claims for idle time that further eroded the value differential, leaving the client paying for something approaching the original price for less than half the original product.

    The fourth is compensation claims for contractor-attributable delays or idle time. At Hazina, claims of Sh871.7 million were lodged and Sh653.8 million was paid. At Bunge Tower, financial claims added Sh1.1 billion to the contract value and interest on delayed payments added a further Sh225.2 million. These claims are a systematic instrument for extracting additional public money after performance has faltered.

    The fifth is evasion of parliamentary accountability. When Jimmy Ji appeared before the PIC in April 2024, committee members publicly doubted whether he was a genuine company official. The documentation he submitted was described as inadequate. The session was adjourned because the company could not respond to the questions asked. This is not an isolated outcome; it is the company’s consistent posture before oversight bodies.

    The sixth is site abandonment. The Soin-Koru dam represents the most extreme manifestation: auditors arriving at a flagship national project site and finding no contractor at all.

    THE HUMAN COST THAT NEITHER THE COMPANY NOR ITS CLIENTS ACCOUNT FOR

    Behind every audit flag is a community bearing a cost that accountants do not capture. Approximately 1,200 families were displaced from the Soin-Koru dam site. They surrendered their land in exchange for a promise that the dam would be built. It has not been. They remain in limbo, unable to return to land that has been designated for inundation and unable to benefit from infrastructure that has not materialised.

    The farmers of the Nyando basin continue to suffer the perennial flooding that the dam was designed to control. The communities that were promised 72,000 cubic metres of reliable daily water supply and 2,570 hectares of irrigated farmland have received neither. The Kisumu Special Economic Zone loses a critical infrastructure anchor. Vision 2030 loses another flagged timeline.

    NSSF members, most of them low-income formal sector workers, are carrying the financial residue of Sh215.5 million in unrecovered mobilisation fees on a housing project that delivered 44 units out of 324 contracted, plus an overpayment of Sh168.8 million that the contractor has not refunded more than a decade after the contracted completion date.

    In the courts, former workers have pursued China Jiangxi through Kenya’s Employment and Labour Relations Court in case after case. The court record documents workers dismissed without notice, without hearing and without terminal benefits, workers denied NSSF remittances, and workers who reported to the Labour Department only to find the company ignoring even the Ministry’s demand letters.

    WHAT THE PROCURING ENTITIES MUST ANSWER

    The National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority must now provide a complete accounting of every payment made to China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited against the Soin-Koru contract. Specifically, the authority must disclose the total amount disbursed in mobilisation advances, interim payment certificates and any other payments; the independently verified physical progress against each payment; the site supervision records and milestone verification procedures that were in place during the period the auditor found the contractor absent; and the status of performance bonds and guarantees, including whether trigger conditions have been met and whether those instruments have been called.

    The authority must also explain why a contractor carrying this documented track record across at least three major public projects was awarded a Sh19.99 billion flagship contract without enhanced performance securities, tighter milestone verification requirements or escalated exit mechanisms. Standard procurement due diligence should have surfaced the Nyayo Estate refusal, the Hazina Trade Centre scope-reduction dispute and the Bunge Tower delays before a single shilling was committed. If that due diligence was conducted and the contract was still awarded without protections, the authority owes Parliament and the public an explanation of that judgement.

    THE ACCOUNTABILITY ACTIONS THAT MUST FOLLOW NOW

    Parliament’s Public Investments Committee and the relevant water, public works and treasury sectoral committees must summon the NWHSA Director General, the Chief Executive of NSSF, the accounting officer of the Parliamentary Service Commission, the Managing Director of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited and the senior representative of the parent company, China Jiangxi International Economic and Technical Cooperation Co. Ltd, for a comprehensive joint sitting. The agenda must include a forensic reconciliation of every payment certificate against certified physical works and dated site photographs across all active and recently completed contracts; the status of all outstanding refund demands; the current position on performance bonds across every live project; and the proposed enforcement actions.

    The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority should initiate an immediate review of the procurement processes through which China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited was awarded its portfolio of Kenyan public contracts, including the Hazina Trade Centre restricted tender, the Parliament Tower procurement challenge and the Soin-Koru award, with a view to determining whether systemic irregularities exist in the awarding pattern.

    The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, which has previously sent investigators to the Bunge Tower site, should be formally petitioned to consider whether the documented pattern of advance payment retention, scope reduction without proportionate price reduction, compensation claims for non-performance and sustained refusal to return public money constitutes conduct warranting criminal investigation.

    Performance bonds must be called immediately wherever contractual trigger conditions have been met. Termination for non-performance must be considered for Soin-Koru, with debarment from future public tenders as an immediate accompanying sanction. The PPRA should place the company on a watch list pending completion of the review, with all new contract awards suspended.

    A NOTE ON STATE OWNERSHIP AND DIPLOMATIC DIMENSIONS

    China Jiangxi International Economic and Technical Cooperation Co. Ltd is not a private contractor operating independently in the market. It is a state-owned enterprise of the People’s Republic of China, headquartered in Nanchang and supervised by the state. Its subsidiary registered in Kenya operates as the vehicle for a parent entity whose conduct is ultimately attributable to the institutions of the Chinese state. That distinction matters when Kenya’s government considers what accountability mechanisms to engage. Diplomatic channels are available alongside legal and procurement remedies, and the government of Kenya has both the right and the obligation to deploy them when a state-owned enterprise of a partner country abandons flagship national infrastructure projects while retaining public funds.

    The government of China frequently emphasises its commitment to mutually beneficial infrastructure partnerships in Africa. The record of China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited as documented across Hazina Trade Centre, Nyayo Embakasi, Bunge Tower, the Umaa Dam and now the Soin-Koru dam is not consistent with that stated commitment. It is consistent with a pattern of profit extraction with inadequate delivery. Kenya’s government should make this representation to Beijing directly and formally, in parallel with domestic accountability proceedings.

    CONCLUSION: THE CONTRACTOR MAY BE ABSENT. ACCOUNTABILITY CANNOT BE.

    The Auditor-General’s finding that the contractor is not on site at the Soin-Koru dam is four words that should produce an immediate, multi-agency accountability response. They have not yet done so. The Business Daily’s reporting of the finding on June 7, 2026 appears, so far, to have been met with institutional silence from the procuring entity and the contractor alike.

    The communities of the Nyando basin are still waiting for the dam their grandparents first petitioned for in the 1960s. The workers displaced from its site are still waiting for the infrastructure that was the justification for their displacement. The pensioners of NSSF are still waiting for a refund from a housing project that ended in 2014 without completion. The MPs of Kenya are occupying a building whose lift did not work when they moved in and whose walls Senator Cherargei told Parliament were already developing cracks.

    China Jiangxi International Kenya Limited has demonstrated across a twelve-year, multi-project record that it can absorb public money, deliver partial performance, deflect accountability and continue operating without consequences. That cycle will repeat at the Soin-Koru dam unless the National Water Harvesting and Storage Authority, the Public Investments Committee, the PPRA, the EACC and the DPP act in concert and without delay.

    The contractor may be absent from the dam site. The question Kenya must now answer is whether the institutions responsible for protecting public money will also remain absent, or whether this time, finally, the consequences will arrive before the next contract is awarded.