Nelson Havi has been practising Kenyan law for three decades. He has stood before every court the country possesses. He has served as president of the Law Society of Kenya and, by general consensus across the bar, has no institutional territory left to protect that would require him to moderate what he says in public.
When Havi speaks in the language of accusation, the legal profession listens, because he has shown no hesitation in putting his name to things that others only say in their cars.
In the past 72 hours, he has put his name to the most concentrated series of judicial corruption allegations to emerge from a single dispute in Kenya’s post-independence legal history. He has named a sitting High Court judge as the intended recipient of a bribe. He has alleged that one of the arrested men claims to share a child with that judge.
He has pointed to forgery of documents filed in court by a Senior Counsel at a leading Nairobi law firm. He has alleged that the English arbitration award forming the foundation of the entire debt recovery exercise was itself corruptly procured. And he has accused the Judicial Service Commission not merely of inaction but of active participation in protecting corrupt judges by accepting bribes to dismiss formal complaints.
Each allegation is serious on its own.
Together they constitute a theory of total institutional capture: a commercial dispute in which the corruption did not begin with the Karen auctioneers who showed up on Monday morning, but with the original deal, ran through the London arbitration, infected the Kenyan court proceedings, enlisted the document process, co-opted the disciplinary commission, and finally placed a disgraced former judge at the gate of a former Cabinet secretary’s property to collect one last payment for the judge now presiding over the case.
“The level of corruption in the Judiciary in general, and in this matter in particular, is so egregious that I cannot agree to be persuaded by the popular but uninformed narrative that this is a case of a defaulter debtor abusing the legal process not to pay. It is not.”
The Confession and the Child
Havi’s most incendiary disclosure is not the naming of Lady Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mongare as the alleged beneficiary of the Sh10.4 million bribery scheme. It is what he added about the personal relationship alleged between the judge and one of the men arrested on March 9, 2026 by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.
“One of the men arrested on Monday soliciting for a bribe represented that he has a child with the judge on whose behalf he was soliciting,” Havi wrote. He did not name which of the four arrested suspects made this claim. The EACC has confirmed that former High Court judge Joseph Mutava, advocate Kimani Wachira and two other individuals were taken into custody and processed at the Integrity Centre Police Station in Nairobi. The commission has said the matter will be forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions for charging. It has not addressed the claim about the child.
Havi has separately stated, in what amounts to direct attribution, that Mutava confessed to investigators that he was collecting the money on behalf of Mongare.
The significance of this claim is structural. Mutava was removed from the High Court bench in 2016 following a tribunal chaired by David Maraga that found him to have improperly handled cases, including a matter involving businessman Kamlesh Pattni. His removal was upheld by the Supreme Court.
A man with that record, allegedly dispatched by a sitting judge to collect money from a litigant on the day that judge delivers her ruling in his case, is not a peripheral detail in the story of how the Kenyan judiciary functions. It is the story.
Mongare has not commented. Her chambers have issued no statement. The Chief Justice’s office has been silent. The JSC has produced nothing. Mongare continues to sit as a judge of the Commercial and Tax Division at Milimani, her cases proceeding on schedule, as if none of this exists.
The Forgery Allegation: A Senior Counsel and a Leading Law Firm
The second strand of Havi’s expanded statement concerns the integrity of the documents on which the entire case was built. Addressing those who frame the Tuju dispute as a simple matter of debt evasion, he asked: “Why are you disregarding the forgery of documents filed in Court by a Senior Counsel in a leading Ivy League Law Firm?”
He did not name the firm or the counsel in this particular post.
But the identity of the Senior Counsel concerned is already a matter of public record, established by Tuju himself in a formal complaint submitted to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations in February 2026.
Tuju named Senior Counsel Fred Ojiambo of Kaplan and Stratton Advocates as the subject of his report, accusing Ojiambo of fabricating evidence and filing false affidavits in cases linked to the East Africa Development Bank.
Tuju’s complaint to the DCI alleged that Ojiambo’s conduct amounted to fabricating evidence contrary to Section 113 of the Penal Code, conspiracy to defeat justice contrary to Section 117 and providing false information to a public servant contrary to Section 129.
He accused Ojiambo of invoking what he characterised as a non-existent diplomatic immunity for the EADB at the High Court, a manoeuvre Tuju alleged had caused proceedings in a related Magistrates Court matter to stall for over a year. He also alleged that the false affidavits filed in the EADB dispute bore resemblance to documents previously submitted at the Supreme Court level in the proceedings against him and his company, Dari Limited.
Ojiambo denied the allegations when contacted by media, stating that he had never forged court documents or affidavits. The DCI confirmed it had received Tuju’s complaint and would make recommendations to the DPP. No charges have been filed.
But the complaint sits on the public record, now amplified by Havi’s platform, and it answers the specific question that commentators and legal bloggers have persistently raised: if Tuju’s dispute is simply a debt he cannot pay, why is he making allegations about forged documents? According to Havi, and now according to a DCI complaint with specific penal code references, the answer is that the documents may not all be genuine.
The timing of this allegation is notable because of what else was happening inside the courtroom during the same period.
In November 2025, before Justice Mongare in an application by Dari Limited seeking to reopen the enforcement question, the EADB’s own former Kenya Country Manager, David Odongo, took the stand and, according to Tuju’s account of his testimony, completely recanted the affidavit evidence he had previously filed.
Tuju described this as newly discovered material capable of altering the entire outcome of the matter. Justice Mongare dismissed the application on March 9, 2026, ruling that the recanted evidence was neither new nor capable of altering her earlier findings and that the matter was barred by res judicata and sub judice principles.
For Havi, the sequence in which a bank officer recants his sworn evidence, a Senior Counsel is accused of forgery, and the court nevertheless proceeds to grant the bank’s position in full on the same day that the presiding judge’s alleged bagman is arrested outside does not resolve as a coincidence. It resolves as a system.
The Arbitration: Corrupting the Foundation
The third element of Havi’s argument is the most legally sophisticated, and the one with the largest structural consequences if pursued. He asked, with visible impatience, why commentators were “ignoring the uncontested allegations of corruption between the arbitrator and one of the parties together with its Advocate” in the English proceedings that produced the foundational award.
The dispute’s genesis in English courts is well established in the public record. The East African Development Bank obtained a judgment from the High Court of Justice in England in June 2019, after arbitration proceedings, ordering repayment of over USD 15 million arising from a loan facility agreement signed in April 2015 between the bank and Tuju’s company, Dari Limited.
That judgment was recognised and registered in Kenya in 2020, upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2023, and allowed to stand by the Supreme Court’s refusal to suspend enforcement. Every Kenyan court to have considered the matter has treated the English award as valid, final and enforceable.
Havi’s position, delivered without qualification, is that the award is not valid. His legal basis for that position is elementary and well-established in international arbitration jurisprudence: an award or judgment obtained by corruption is null and void. This is not a controversial proposition.
The principle that corruption vitiates an arbitral award is deeply embedded in the public policy exception to enforcement recognised in the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, which Kenya has ratified.
It is the principle on which Nigeria succeeded in the English High Court in 2023 in overturning an USD 11 billion arbitration award in the P&ID case, where the court found that the award had been obtained through the most severe abuses of the arbitral process.
Havi has further pointed to what he described as cases where securities given for lending have been exempted from realisation through auctions or private treaties on account of corruption, fraud, unfairness and unconscionableness on the part of the bank.
He grounded this in a reference to the Supreme Court Act, noting that it initially contained a section for the invalidation of a judgment of a judge removed from office for unsuitability to serve, a section that was, in his words, “removed mysteriously.”
The implication is that the legislative architecture which would have provided a direct remedy for a corrupted judgment was deliberately dismantled, and that the absence of that provision now forces the courts to rely on more cumbersome paths to the same destination.
Whether Tuju’s legal team can produce the evidence necessary to ground a corruption challenge to the English award is a question that will determine the future of this litigation. But Havi’s point is prior to that evidentiary question. He is asking why the institutional commentators, the bar association, the Judiciary, the media, are treating the award as sacrosanct when its procurement has been publicly alleged to be corrupt and those allegations have not been contested on the merits.
The Debt Argument: ‘Sisi Siyo Wajinga’
Havi addressed directly the popular framing that Tuju is simply a debtor evading his obligations. He did not dispute that Tuju and his companies owe money. He made a more provocative and more interesting argument.
“Listen friends and enemies, the issue is not whether Raphael Tuju and his companies are in debt or default. Everyone is. In fact, the Government of Kenya is in debt and in default,” he wrote. He asked whether the conclusion to be drawn is that goons should be sent to government offices, and everyone in debt should face corruptly obtained auction orders.
He turned to the specific buyers who allegedly arrived at the Karen property claiming to have purchased it: Mr Chebet, Mr Kiprono and Mr Kiprop, named by Tuju himself. “You want to tell me that it is only Kiprono, Kiprop and Chebet who have billions of shillings in the collapsed economy to buy someone’s hotels in an auction when everyone, including the Government of Kenya where they serve and/or are doing business with, are broke? Sisi siyo wajinga ma Fren.”
The argument is not legally technical. It is politically shrewd. In an economy where the government has repeatedly acknowledged its own fiscal distress, where debt service consumes the majority of the national budget and Treasury bills are sold to bridge monthly salary obligations, the emergence of private buyers with the immediate liquidity to acquire multi-billion shilling properties at distressed auction prices invites questions about the origin of that capital that no court in the country is currently asking. Havi is asking them in public.
His framing also serves a secondary purpose. By establishing that debt and default are universal conditions in the current Kenyan economy, he dissolves the moral framework in which the bank, the auctioneers and the court are cast as enforcers of legitimate commercial order against an unworthy debtor.
If the enforcement mechanism is itself corrupt, from the arbitration through the documents through the judge through the commission, then the identity of Tuju as a debtor becomes irrelevant to the question of whether the process is legitimate.
The JSC: A Commission That Watches and Does Nothing
The Judicial Service Commission received a public allegation from a Senior Counsel on a verified social media platform stating that a sitting judge was the intended recipient of a criminal bribe in an active case. It has said nothing. This is not unusual. The commission has a documented history of inaction in the face of specific, evidenced complaints about individual judges, including complaints filed by Havi himself.
In July 2025, Havi filed a formal sworn petition seeking the removal of Lady Justice Mongare over her conduct in a separate commercial matter.
In January 2025, he filed a formal petition seeking the removal of Justice Alfred Mabeya over a pattern of conduct in the Commercial Division that Havi described as gross misconduct and misbehaviour. In August 2025, the JSC dismissed the Mabeya petition on jurisdictional grounds.
The Mongare petition produced no recorded outcome. Havi’s allegation this week is that both judges bribed their way clear of formal accountability, rendering the commission not a safeguard against judicial corruption but its most reliable protection.
The Mabeya complaint record adds texture that the JSC has not been required to account for publicly. A 2015 complaint against Mabeya was withdrawn after the complainant was, according to reporting at the time, financially induced to abandon it.
A 2020 petition seeking his removal was similarly withdrawn in circumstances that were never explained. In December 2024, Havi named specific Senior Counsel who he alleged had never lost a case before Mabeya, suggesting a structured commercial relationship between the judge and certain practitioners in the Commercial Division.
The JSC received Havi’s formal petition in January 2025 and disposed of it in August 2025 on grounds that kept the substance of the allegations entirely unexamined.
If Havi’s characterisation of the commission is accurate, then the body constitutionally charged with maintaining judicial integrity has been converted into a mechanism for laundering judicial corruption. Complaints enter. Money changes hands. Complaints exit, classified as jurisdictionally defective or lacking in merit. The judges return to their benches. The cases continue. The auctioneers arrive.
Tuju at the Wall
Raphael Tuju stood at the gate of his Dari Business Park on Ngong Road this week and delivered the statement of a man who has decided that the language of law cannot reach him any further. “They will have to kill me first and organise a big burial for me in Rarieda before they take this property.” He has litigated in London.
He has appealed in Nairobi. He has petitioned the Supreme Court. He has filed complaints with the Land Registrar, the DCI, the EACC. He has watched his applications dismissed. He has watched property transfers proceed through what he alleges were subsisting court orders.
He has watched a DCI officer escort buyers from Ultra Eureka Limited to his premises in January 2025. He has watched a bank official who swore affidavits against him recant those same affidavits on the witness stand, only for the recantation to be classified as evidence that could not alter the outcome.
And now he has watched a former judge be arrested at his gate, claiming to collect money for the judge inside.
Nelson Havi’s warning is the one that the legal establishment most needs to hear, even if it is the one least likely to be acknowledged.
When a man who has exhausted every available legal remedy concludes that the institutions are not failing him by accident but by design, and when a Senior Counsel with three decades of standing says publicly that he agrees, the conversation has moved beyond procedural reform and entered the territory of constitutional emergency.
The Judicial Service Commission has not spoken. Lady Justice Mongare has not spoken. The Chief Justice has not spoken.
Kenya’s courts have a long tradition of demanding that litigants trust the process. Raphael Tuju has trusted the process. He trusted it in London in 2019. He trusted it in Nairobi in 2020. He trusted it before the Court of Appeal in 2023.
He trusted it before Justice Mongare’s bench on March 9, 2026, the day she dismissed his case and the day the EACC arrested the man who allegedly told investigators he was collecting money for her. Whatever the process has been doing with that trust, it has not been using it to produce justice.
