In Kenya, the primary instrument of theft is seldom the midnight raid or the crude seizure of title. It is debt – tethered to a narrative of urgency, and to a carefully socialized sequence of events designed to manufacture the appearance of emergency.
Once that emergency is established, a familiar raft of “recovery” mechanisms follows: the grabbing of land, the hurried sale of an asset, and the quiet transfer of ownership from public or communal hands into private ones.
Grasp the model and the rest coheres. It begins at the micro-level, in institutions that welcome membership, shareholding, and subscription – places that ask ordinary people to belong, to contribute, and to trust.
𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐮𝐲𝐮: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐦 𝐎𝐮𝐭𝐟𝐢𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞-𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤
Before one arrives at Muthaiga, a quieter feud is already unfolding at Makuyu Golf Club, and the undertones are identical. A clique of elderly officials registered a phantom entity bearing names indistinguishable from the club itself, then petitioned Kakuzi Kenya Limited to surrender the title deed to that creature of paper.
In a rare display of colonial foresight and institutional competence, Kakuzi went to court. The land had been originally excised from its holding and vested in trustees for a recreation facility owned by members – not by a self-appointed inner circle of barons, land dealers and tenderprenuers.
The court halted the attempt.
Frustrated, those same officials have now chosen to make the membership suffer: they refuse to sign cheques for the club’s day-to-day running. The lesson is pedagogic. When a facility has outlived its usefulness to their realities, the next course is to sell the asset and divide the proceeds.
That is the Boomer and Gen X reflex at its most unvarnished: when the thing no longer serves us, liquidate it.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐚𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭: 𝐍𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐡’𝐬 𝐕𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐲𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐤𝐚
The same predatory instinct has entered the sanctuary. Consider the ACK Thika Diocese. Members raised funds to acquire a house for the bishop – a pristine property at the most upscale address in Thika Town, formerly the official residence of the Barclays Bank manager, floated on the market when colonial institutions offloaded non-performing assets.
Barely twelve years after the 2005 fundraiser, a group of men known as the Standing Committee of the Synod met in secret and agreed to sell the very house they had mobilized politicians and congregants to purchase – under the guise of “debt,” so that they might embark on separate commercial ventures, including the building of flats.
𝑊𝑜𝑒 𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑗𝑜𝑖𝑛 ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒, 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑎𝑦 𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑙𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑙𝑑, 𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑏𝑒 𝑛𝑜 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒.
The vineyard is sold, and the widow’s mite is converted into storeyed concrete.
𝐌𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐚: 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐞 𝐈𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
Members of Muthaiga Golf Club may imagine themselves insulated from the vagaries of bad governance by proximity to the city and the prestige of their address. They are mistaken. The model does not change with the postcode. Debt remains the instrument. An antagonizing sequence of events must be staged.
Nothing produces collective trauma and panic – the ideal weather for emergency fundraising – quite like the threat of debt recovery. In Kenya that recovery is a parallel process, often enforced by brute police force and hired goons. The mere imagery is enough to frighten the typical middle-class member into subservience.
Thus the optics of Kenya Forest Service rangers, armed with rifles and accompanied by marauding dogs, patrolling the pristine fairways of Muthaiga were neither accidental nor theatrical excess. They were deliberate. They were intended.
Boomers and Gen X, when they turn to high-level fraud, play a long game. Those who sought to liberate Kenya saw this plainly in the 2024 protests.
Established politicians who purported to join the movement (Raila Odinga, Martha Karua, James Orengo, Justin Muturi, Rigathi Gachagua, Fred Matiangi, Babu Owino, Edwin Sifuna) did not come for revolution – for structural and institutional overhaul. They came for a favorable transition: the replacement of one set of demagogues with another. Mass prosperity was never the point.
𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝: 𝐒𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞, 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞
To facilitate such a heist, the psychological and democratic weather must first be made conducive. In institutions of every kind, small, subtle, but firm measures appear: dissent is suppressed, critics are penalized, and the narrative is captured.
In churches the infrastructure is already built. Isolation can be dressed as holiness. Problematic members are simply not invited to functions hosted in the residences of wealthy patrons adjacent to senior clergy and holding positions in church councils.
Plausible deniability is preserved; the church itself never lifts a finger to curtail criticism, because those are demonic attributes which would defeat the very logic of having a church in the first place.
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑡 𝑎 𝑔𝑛𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤 𝑎 𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑙 – 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑖𝑡 𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟.
In members’ clubs the method is more formal: statutory compliance, due process, constitutions written to starve mechanisms of questioning. Pilferage continues without interrogation.
For instance, Railways Club issued a memo warning members against “politicking” – not to safeguard peace, but because a secretary, of the same community as the President, buys members free alcohol, and they in turn mortgage the very freedoms for which the club was established.
Anyone who tells you not to discuss politics in a club is selling you something. Mwai Kibaki’s presidential career was structured around his membership of Muthaiga Golf Club; the press itself gravitated to that association. Clubs exist, in part, as controlled rooms in which politics may be spoken freely. That right should not be surrendered to political correctness.
Former Juja MP George Thuo died after he drank in a public bar in Thika Town. If he had been in a members’ club, it would have been harder for someone to poison him. Club members pay high fees. They should not be forced to meet in public places by rules conjured by cliques seeking to loot club coffers in silence.
Boomers and Gen X understand the power of association. They therefore craft statutes, under the banner of propriety, to deter any threat to their arrangements and to preserve the broader political machine that allows them to thrive while the country contracts.
Muthaiga had already primed itself for isolation. Guests wait long at the gate; service is restricted to cards. Measures that look like exclusivity on paper become a liability when public sympathy is required. In the court of public opinion, the club now struggles to be heard.
Members would do well to interrogate their constitutions. Forceful displacement of land in Kenya is not folklore. In Watamu for instance, the only remaining public green space – a park of trees – was felled in a single night while residents protested to no avail.
Ethical presence in a community – training schoolchildren, mentoring underprivileged golfers, employing locals, awarding supply tenders nearby, planting trees, equipping the adjacent clinic – cannot be substituted for the colonial illusion of exclusivity. When the wolf arrives, the fence you built against your neighbours will not save you.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐱𝐢𝐬
Members point to factions tied to established power as the force behind the Muthaiga encroachment. Prominent figures in the club have been linked to close ties with William Ruto and the wider political establishment; the Kenya Forest Service does not ordinarily enter such ground without an invitation of some kind.
Those profiled include Kasarani MP Ronald Karauri; Central Bank of Kenya Governor Kamau Thugge; former Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero; former Mukurweini MP Kabando wa Kabando; and Andrew Musangi, husband of Maryanne Kirubi.
They are so named because of past catalogues of primitive accumulation and association with an establishment that rewards the entrenchment of theft, violence, and displacement.
𝐑𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐝 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐢, CEO of SportPesa, waged a protracted war between 2019 and 2022 with original shareholders Paul Ndung’u and Asenath Wacera. The method, as recounted, was simple: as a betting concern riding SMS and M-Pesa rails, ownership of the paybill was shifted from Pevans East Africa to Milestone Games, which he controls with Bulgarian mafias – executed with the assistance of the then head of M-Pesa, Sitoyo Lopokoyit, married to his sister.
𝐊𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐮 𝐓𝐡𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐞’s career in the Treasury is described as the same pattern at national scale: World Bank and IMF loans that the public never sees attached to non-existent projects, used as leverage to bribe politicians, bureaucrats, commercial activists and mainstream (githeri) media to influence policies that weaken local production, manufacturing, and agriculture in favour of imports – an architecture of which he is portrayed as principal enforcer.
𝐄𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐊𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐨’s record is a matter of public damage, not of debate. He inherited Mumias Sugar as a working mill and presided over its ruin. He obtained import licences, shut the factory under the pretext of maintenance, and used that idle period to flood the market with counterfeit imported sugar after bribing MP’s from the sugar belt to engineer a tax-free window. Farmers in the cane belt were stripped of their season.
He also found Mumias Sugar FC in the Kenya Premier League and killed the club. That was not a restructuring. It was contempt for an industry, for a town’s team, and for the one public joy left to the young people who had already lost the factory.
𝐊𝐚𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐨 𝐰𝐚 𝐊𝐚𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐨, despite an anti-establishment posture, is placed within the political order that birthed the CDF, with little to show in Mukurweini for hundreds of millions received; his alignment with Rigathi Gachagua is framed in the same light – mansions rising where schools and hospitals do not.
𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐰 𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐢 sits as a chairman at the Central Bank (alongside Thugge as Governor) and as the public face of Sidian Bank, described here as a facility tied to the laundering of funds for the outgoing president. His wife Maryanne is the daughter of the late Chris Kirubi, associated with the ruin of enterprises such as KENATCO and Uchumi.
Their media outfit Capital FM’s editorial line on the Muthaiga matter is characterized as aligned with regime and KFS framing, with no article defending the club despite public memos from its chairman.
This constellation – tied to the political establishment – forms the axis in which Muthaiga now finds itself. Because such figures can buy other members free drinks and invite them to their homes for parties, they can influence statutory interventions that tighten their grip and open the door to encroachments of this kind.
𝐀 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞
Club members not just in Muthaiga but countrywide, must defend the integrity, independence, and sovereignty of their clubs. The moment some members are worshipped as more equal than others, the end has already begun.
𝐻𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑓𝑢𝑙 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑓𝑢𝑙 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝑖𝑛 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ.
Land held in trust, a house raised by the widow’s mite, a fairway meant for recreation rather than liquidation – these are the least and the much together.
Debt is the yoke. Urgency is the sermon. Sale is the sacrament of the inner circle.
Refuse the yoke. Interrogate the constitution. Do not trade the commons for a round of complimentary whisky. Everybody, in the end, is a potential victim.
1 comment
I used to worship at st John Riruta catholic church and I noted the sorry state of a public primary school just a breath away from church. Infact during construction in church we used the school washroom.The church has it’s own private school so you understand the matrix