Category: Business Daily

Saccos are the latest to push back against plans to allow the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) to raid taxpayers’ bank accounts in the middle of contested tax demands, warning of potential cash flow pressures and operational disruption.

The Kenya Union of Savings and Credit Cooperatives (Kuscco) on Wednesday asked the National Assembly not to pass the proposal in the Finance Bill 2026, which seeks an amendment on the Tax Procedures Act.

Section 42(14) (e) of the Tax Procedures Act bars the KRA from issuing agency notices, freezing bank accounts and assets or taking any enforcement measures while a tax dispute is still active or under appeal.

However, the Finance Bill 2026 is proposing the deletion of this provision.

‘Taxpayers may feel compelled to prioritise immediate financial survival over the pursuit of legitimate claims, particularly where enforcement measures such as agency notices restrict access to working capital or disrupt operations,’ Kuscco said in submissions made to Parliament by its Chief Executive Arnold Munene.

Kuscco joins the Kenya Bankers Association and Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa) in campaigning against the proposal.

According to Kepsa, the agency notices will compel third parties-typically bank or trade debtors-to remit funds directly to the KRA on behalf of the taxpayer even before a dispute is heard and determined.

‘If the taxpayer subsequently succeeds on appeal, recovery of those funds from KRA is uncertain or protracted,’ Kepsa said in its submissions on May 25.

‘The practical effect is that the right of appeal is rendered illusory. A taxpayer who cannot withstand the financial pressure of an agency notice is compelled to abandon a meritorious appeal or settle under duress rather than on the merits.’

Kuscco told the National Assembly Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning that allowing the taxman to recover disputed amounts through agency notices will disrupt operations of financial entities such as saccos by restricting access to working capital and liquidity.

‘Funds held in sacco accounts are not idle reserves but are deployed to support lending, member withdrawals and ongoing financial obligations. The issuing of agency notices against such funds can disrupt lending and delay access to member savings,’ Mr Munene said.

Similar attempts to expand the enforcement powers of the KRA have been proposed in previous Finance Bills, reflecting an ongoing policy tension between strengthening revenue collection and protecting the Kenyan taxpayer.

Kepsa said giving KRA such powers will have ‘immediate and severe’ consequences for taxpayers with disputes currently before the courts, given that they had structured their litigation strategy on the basis of the existing tax procedures.

‘Removing that protection mid -litigation-without any transitional provisions-exposes them to enforcement action they had no reason to anticipate when commencing their appeals. We submit that the proposed deletion should be rejected in its entirety,’ Kepsa told the parliamentary team.

Private sector players are concerned that premature enforcement through agency notices also poses difficulty and delay in obtaining refunds where a taxpayer ultimately succeeds in a dispute.

Kenya’s tax dispute resolution process – from objection to tribunal and court determination – is usually lengthy.

Private sector players are, therefore, worried that the decision would see them part with significant amounts and chase the money for many years since refunds are ‘neither automatic nor immediate’ when they win cases.

‘The issuance of agency notices during disputes may significantly disrupt business operations by restricting access to working capital and liquidity,’ Mr Munene added in his submissions.

‘This risk is particularly pronounced for saccos and other financial institutions, whose operational stability depends on the continuous availability of funds.’

Kenyan businesses using WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook now eye a sales boost as Meta rolls out artificial intelligence-powered agents that can text customers, recommend products and close purchases on behalf of employees.

The three social media platforms’ American parent firm, Meta, is rolling out the ‘Business Agents’ globally this week, targeting small and medium-sized businesses.

The AI agents will be able to answer customer questions, recommend products, negotiate prices, book appointments and escalate conversations to human staff when necessary.

For now, traders using Meta’s Business tools only get retail chatbots that rely on scripted responses and predefined menus to respond to customer messages.

AI agents can take actions on behalf of users, effectively providing firms with a round-the-clock digital salesperson at no cost.

‘We’re expanding our Business Agent to businesses of all sizes, so you can have yours up and running within minutes, responding in your customers’ language using your tone,’ Meta said in a blog post.

The tech giant is rolling out the agents for free, but it said it would, ‘in the coming months”, put the service behind a paid subscription model under its Meta One ecosystem.

Meta One, unveiled last month, bundles advanced AI capabilities, creator tools and business services across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

It includes deeper AI reasoning for complex tasks, algorithm priority on social media feeds and advanced post analytics.

Monthly subscription prices range from $7.99 (Sh1,033) to $49.99 (Sh6,466), depending on features and usage levels.

AI agents are powered by the same large language model technology behind AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

The agents combine chatbots’ conversational abilities with access to third-party applications such as a business’s catalogue, allowing them to plan, reason and execute complex tasks with little human intervention.

For a Kenyan clothes retailer, for instance, a customer could send a question through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Instagram direct message, on which dress sizes are available, whether a specific colour is in stock, what promotions are running and which accessories best complement a particular outfit.

For service businesses like salons, clinics or consultants, Meta’s AI agents will be able to schedule appointments and manage customer enquiries without requiring staff involvement, according to demo videos seen by the Business Daily.

Meta said businesses will be able to define when humans should step into conversations, creating a hybrid model where routine queries are automated while complex issues are handled by staff.

The update comes as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram increasingly become digital storefronts for businesses across Africa.

The Communications Authority of Kenya says more than 68 percent of the country’s adults use Facebook, while about 54 percent use WhatsApp.

Facebook was Kenya’s most visited social media platform in 2025, according to web traffic monitor Cloudflare. It was followed by the Chinese video-sharing site TikTok, and then Instagram and WhatsApp.

In Kenya, thousands of small enterprises use WhatsApp Business as their primary customer communication channel, often replacing websites and dedicated e-commerce platforms.

Many of these businesses depend on basic automated replies that can only answer simple questions, such as when a shop opens and closes, as well as external links to the business’s catalogue.

Many small businesses struggle to maintain customer support outside working hours and often lose sales opportunities when enquiries are not answered.

An AI agent capable of responding instantly, recommending products and qualifying leads around the clock could improve conversion rates while reducing staffing costs.

Meta says future versions of the AI agents will be capable of conducting market research and point out product trends for businesses.

‘We will expand its capabilities to help fully run all your daily operations – like surfacing product insights, connecting with the tools to manage your calendar and providing competitive intelligence,’ Meta said.

However, the advent of AI agents has raised concerns among cybersecurity experts, who say the virtual tools create new attack surfaces as they can access systems and perform actions autonomously.

An emerging threat “prompt injection attack”, is when cyberattackers hide malicious instructions in seemingly harmless content to manipulate an AI system into performing unauthorised actions. Experts say the risk is heightened when AI agents are connected to customer databases, payment systems, calendars or internal business software.

Last week, Meta’s AI support chatbot was tricked into resetting account credentials for high-profile social media pages, including the dormant Obama White House account.

The chatbot was persuaded to reset account credentials without independently verifying , locking users out of their accounts.

Meta’s introduction of agentic AI for businesses is part of efforts to diversify revenue beyond digital advertising by turning AI into a standalone product. The firm recently introduced advertising on WhatsApp, marking a shift for the app.

It gave Kenyan businesses an avenue to run campaigns in the Status feed to promote products and services, with ads designed to initiate instant conversations.

A breakdown of equipment, including a CT scanner, locked an estimated 82,000 people from accessing inpatient services at Mathari National Teaching and Referral Hospital (MNTRH) during the 2024/25 financial year, according to disclosures.

MNTRH is the country’s only public mental health referral centre. Traditionally an inpatient referral hospital, MNTRH has in recent years expanded to offer outpatient clinical services, including counselling and psychotherapy, pharmaceutical, physiotherapy and orthopaedics, laboratory, rehabilitative, dental and general outpatient consultations.

According to the National Treasury, inpatient admissions at MNTRH reached 228,700 against a target of 310,418 – a shortfall of 26 percent.

Outpatient attendance was 181,212 against a target of 192,453. Imaging is a critical component of psychiatric care, as clinicians must first rule out neurological and other medical conditions that can cause psychiatric symptoms.

The absence of CT and radiology services delayed the diagnostics required to discharge patients, increasing the average inpatient length of stay to 50 days, compared to the 46-day target.

The 2024 Kenya Health Facility Assessment found that only 61 percent of hospitals were equipped for effective care. An earlier audit of Level Four hospitals showed that 35 percent consistently had a functional X-ray kit.

MNTRH received Sh1.05 billion for 2024/25, despite a stated requirement of Sh3.6 billion, forcing gadget maintenance to compete with wages, drugs and basic operations.

The National Clinical Guidelines for Management of Common Mental Disorders notes that one in every 10 Kenyans has a common mental health disorder, yet services are available in just 29 of the 284 Level Four and above hospitals.

Seventeen counties have no psychiatrists, and all mentally ill persons requiring inpatient care are admitted exclusively to Mathari, regardless of severity or distance.

MNTRH treats around 64,000 inpatients every year, but has only 366 employees, or roughly 26 percent of the recommended workforce of 1,416.

The hospital received Sh1.05 billion for 2024/25 against a stated requirement of Sh3.6 billion, forcing equipment maintenance to compete directly with wages, medicines, and basic operations.

In August 2025, the government launched the National Equipment Service Programme to replace the failed Managed Equipment Services programme, a model under which the state had signed seven-year contracts in 2015 with five original equipment manufacturers to supply, install, maintain, and replace diagnostic and surgical equipment in 98 hospitals across all 47 counties.

The 2024/25 Auditor General’s report noted that inpatient numbers consistently exceed the 700-bed capacity, with patients sleeping on the floor in conditions that breach constitutional rights to health.

Daily occupancy has been recorded at between 700 and 750, placing the civil section’s bed occupancy rate at 119 percent.

Meanwhile, the 2021-2025 Mental Health Action Plan recorded that the government spends approximately 15 cents on mental health for every Kenyan each year, compared to the recommended Sh250, a fraction of what experts say is needed to deliver meaningful care.

Two former managers of DTB Bank and a third suspect were on Tuesday charged with stealing more than Sh149.3 million from a customer’s account in a scheme that allegedly ran for several years.

Salimah Ameen Pirbhai, the former DTB Parklands branch manager, Aabid Alkarim Kassam, the former assistant branch manager, and Tazim Sidi Vassanji were arraigned before a Milimani court facing a total of 68 counts, including conspiracy to defraud, stealing, money laundering and forgery.

The prosecution alleges that between 2016 and 2020, the trio fraudulently withdrew funds from Great Britain Pounds account belonging to Rozina Nurdin Patelia.

The court heard that investigations into the alleged theft began in July 2025 and that the accused cooperated with officers from the Banking Fraud Investigations Unit.

Fraud charges

In the first count, the three are accused of conspiring to steal £233,270.14 (about Sh40.6 million) from Ms Patelia’s account between July 5, 2019 and March 26, 2020 at DTB’s Parklands branch.

Pirbhai, 55, was separately charged with stealing Sh39.6 million from the bank on June 4, 2025 while serving as branch manager.

She, Kassam, 43, and Vassanji, 57, also face a joint charge of stealing £233,270.17 from Ms Patelia’s account between July 5, 2019 and June 26, 2020.

Kassam faces the bulk of the charges. He is accused of stealing Sh58.2 million from the same account between October 31, 2016 and April 5, 2018, and a further Sh10.9 million between June 14, 2019 and October 4, 2021 while serving as assistant manager at the Parklands branch.

The prosecution further alleges that the three engaged in money laundering by acquiring and retaining £233,270.17, knowing or having reason to believe that the funds were proceeds of crime.

Kassam was separately charged with retaining Sh58.2 million and Sh10.9 million allegedly obtained through fraudulent transactions.

Forgery counts

According to the charge sheet, Kassam made a false instruction letter dated June 5, 2019, purporting that it had been authored by Ms Patelia and authorising cash withdrawals from her account.

The Director of Public Prosecutions further alleges that the three forged another instruction letter dated June 9, 2019, claiming it had been issued by the account holder to authorise withdrawals.

Pirbhai is accused of preparing a fake bank statement on June 10, 2025 for the account and later uttering the document with intent to deceive.

Kassam also faces several forgery-related charges. He allegedly forged withdrawal slips for GBP 8,500 and GBP 8,700 in June 2019 and is accused of generating fraudulent withdrawal documents amounting to more than GBP 7.6 million.

In addition, he allegedly created false email instructions purporting to have been sent by Ms Patelia authorising the liquidation of multiple fixed deposits valued at millions of shillings between 2016 and 2018.

Bond terms

The accused sought release on bond, arguing that they had fully cooperated with investigators and were not flight risks.

‘I urge the court to release the accused on bond as they have cooperated with investigators since July 2025 when the probe into the alleged theft of funds from the complainant began,’ a defence lawyer submitted.

The court heard that the three had earlier been released on police cash bail of Sh100,000 and had never failed to attend questioning sessions.

The defence further argued that the accused were in poor health and had no intention of leaving the country.

‘I urge this court to consider releasing the accused on a cash bail of Sh100,000.’

The prosecution did not oppose their release but urged the court to consider the substantial sums involved in the alleged fraud.

In a brief ruling, the court noted that the accused had complied with investigation requirements while on police bond.

The court released Kassam on a bond of Sh2 million or an alternative cash bail of Sh500,000. Pirbhai and Vassanji were each released on a bond of Sh1 million or an alternative cash bail of Sh300,000.

The magistrate directed the prosecution to supply witness statements and documentary evidence to the defence.

The case will be mentioned on June 17, 2026 for directions and to confirm compliance with disclosure requirements before hearing dates are set.

Kenya has frozen a planned increase in electricity prices from July 1 amid fears of sparking outrage ahead of the elections, dealing a blow to Kenya Power’s search for extra revenues to enable it to undertake a network upgrade.

Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi said on Wednesday that Kenya Power had withdrawn its application for new tariffs, ending a public participation drive that was to start on June 15.

The withdrawal of the tariffs comes in a period when a rise in fuel prices, linked to the Iran war, has sparked deadly protests, which forced the State to cut diesel prices to defuse the outrage.

The economic fallout from the Iran war also pushed inflation to a 27-month high of 6.7 percent.

The indefinite suspension of the new electricity prices looks set to derail the quest for additional billions that Kenya Power requires to upgrade transmission lines and transformers.

The new tariffs were expected to be in force until June 2029 in line with the law, which demands that electricity prices are increased after every three years to factor inflation.

The State is also fretful about increased power costs piling pressure on inflation just months to the August 2027 General Election.

‘Following consultations within government and engagement with key stakeholders in the sector, the retail electricity tariff review application that was submitted on March 31, this year by Kenya Power on behalf of the sector has been withdrawn,’ Mr Wandayi said on Wednesday afternoon.

‘This decision reflects the need to buttress a sustainable energy sector while protecting households, businesses and industries from possible cost escalation.’

Electricity bills have two main components: a fixed tariff whose proceeds go directly to Kenya Power and variable costs such as fuel and forex surcharges that change monthly and mainly used to compensate generators. While the fixed tariff has remained unchanged, the monthly fuel and foreign exchange surcharges have changed slightly.

Kenya last increased electricity tariffs in April 2023 in a review that boosted Kenya Power’s profits, provided resources for network upgrades and cash to other utilities like Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) -which builds high-voltage lines.

Kenya Power has in recent years found itself at the centre of a delicate balancing act in its quest to raise more revenues for the energy sector and freeze tariff review.

The 2023 review saw Kenya Power get an increase in tariff in the first year and cut in the second year, which together with lower forex and fuel surcharges have helped reduce household electricity costs.

Electricity prices have declined over the three-year tariff cycle, with 200kWh retailing at Sh5,656.88 in April compared to Sh6,349.80 in the same period of 2023, according to official data.

The utility firm has recently defended the push for higher tariffs, saying that it needs more money to upgrade the aging network and meet the increased demand for connections.

Kenya Power currently has over 10.2 million customers and the growth has strained the network, underscoring the need for cash to revamp the system and ensure a reliable supply of electricity.

The firm has repeatedly warned that the transmission and distribution network is constrained, adding that the burden has triggered countrywide outages due to a sudden surge in demand.

The tariffs adjustment was expected to put more upward pressure on the economy where the year-on-year inflation has hit record high on high energy prices in the wake of the Iran war.

Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels carry an 18.30 percent weighting in the basket of goods used to measure inflation.

Two-day strike

Public transporters staged a two-day strike last month against the rise in fuel prices in the wake of the Iran war.

That brought economic activity in Nairobi to a standstill and degenerated into clashes between protesters and police that left ?four people dead and about 30 injured.

Diesel prices rose 23.5 percent to Sh242.92 a litre for the May-June pricing cycle but were reduced by Sh10 on May 18 in response to the strike.

Higher electricity prices following costly fuel would have triggered consumer complaints.

Kenya’s inflation accelerated for the second month running in May, hitting its highest in more than two years, largely due to fuel price hikes linked to the Iran war, hurting workers’ disposable income.

The government is set to wind up a Sh362 billion rural roads programme launched during former President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration and replace it with a securitisation model, under which it plans to issue a bond backed by future collections from the fuel levy.

The National Assembly’s Transport Committee disclosed that the government had resolved to scale down the annuity programme, citing the high cost of maintaining this variant of the public-private partnership (PPP) that the Jubilee government conceived as a means of reducing Kenya’s heavy debt load from road projects.

Dubbed the ‘Roads 10,000 Programme’, the annuity model involves private contractors designing, building and maintaining roads for a predetermined period.

The government will then repay the contractor its portion, largely from funds it receives from the fuel levy in equal instalments (annuity) over a set period from the time a road is completed.

However, in its review of the budget estimates for the financial year starting July, the Transport Committee said the programme had become too costly to sustain, prompting the government to shift its focus to a securitisation plan anchored on a bond backed by the Sh5-per-litre fuel levy.

‘The Committee on Transport observed that the government has scaled down the Roads Annuity Programme due to high project costs and no new project will be procured under the annuity funding model,’ the National Assembly Budget and Appropriations Committee said in a report on the budget estimates for the upcoming fiscal year.

The committee added that the Sh3 per litre that used to go to the annuity fund will be reduced to Sh1.50, which will only cater for payments relating to the three completed annuity-financed projects.

The road projects that have so far been completed include Ngong-Kiserian-Isinya/Kajiado-Imaroro (Lot 33); select town roads in the Central region (Lot 15); and select town roads in the western region (Lot 18).

This reduction will ultimately reduce future flows into the annuity fund, leading to its end.

‘In this regard, the Sh3 per litre charge to the flow to the Annuity Fund will be reduced to Sh1.50, while the proceeds from the surrendered Sh1.50 per litre will support the securitisation process supported by the Sh5 per litre allocation,’ reads the report, adding that securitisation has already begun.

The government expects to float a bond of Sh120 billion, which will be backed by collections from the fuel levy.

The annuity programme has been used to offset the traditional reliance on the annual budget to construct rural roads whose use is limited.

The National Treasury previously noted that the traditional reliance had resulted in significant challenges, including budgetary constraints, high unit costs and slow project completion.

The Roads Annuity Programme was approved by Cabinet in March 2015 and planned for the upgrade of up to 10,000 kilometres of road.

The private sector has assumed commercial functions traditionally held by the government, shifting the projects’ risk away from the State.

The annuity programme has been crucial in overseeing the construction of major roads, including the 91-kilometre Ngong-Kiserian-Isinya-Imaroro Road Project (Lot 33) in Kajiado County, which was implemented through the Kenya Rural Roads Authority, where Intex RAF Limited financed the bulk of the costs.

Other projects are Lot 15, which upgraded 44.7 kilometres of identified town roads across six counties, including Nyeri, Kirinyaga, Murang’a, Embu, Tharaka Nithi and Laikipia.

Lot 18, meanwhile, focused on 35.1 kilometres of identified town roads across western Kenya, spanning Kakamega, Vihiga, Bungoma and Busia counties.

In January 2024, President Ruto’s government indicated that it would abandon the roads annuity programme, citing poor standards of roads being constructed using the low-volume seal roads technology introduced in 2014 by the then Uhuru Kenyatta administration.

While the technology reportedly reduced construction costs by up to 60 percent, the quality of roads put up was deemed poor.

‘When we constructed these roads, we anticipated that they would be for private vehicles and public transport use only, but they have since been used by even commercial vehicles that carry heavy loads,’ said Kipchumba Murkomen, the then Transport Cabinet Secretary.

Under the 2024/25 budget, however, the then National Treasury Cabinet Secretary, Prof Njuguna Ndung’u, scaled up the allocation for the programme fivefold to Sh14.09 billion from Sh3 billion previously.

The programme was approved with a total investment of $2.8 billion (Sh362.4 billion).

The Sh1.50 residual allocation to the Annuity Fund will transition to support the securitisation of road sector pending bills where the government has raised up to Sh175 billion in commercial bank bridge facilities to clear arrears owed to road contractors.

The government has indicated plans to raise Sh120 billion from a Kenya Roads Board (KRB) bond, with investors being compensated using collections from the Road Maintenance Levy Fund.

‘In this regard, the Sh3 per litre charge to flow to the Annuity Fund will be reduced to Sh1.50 per litre, while the proceeds from the surrendered Sh1.50 per litre will support the securitisation of the Sh5 per litre allocation,’ the BAC committee added.

The National Land Commission (NLC) has opened a fresh court battle to block payment of more than Sh1 billion to a private developer for a parcel of land reserved for the construction of a hospital for the National Police Service (NPS) in Nairobi’s Embakasi area.

In a suit filed at the Environment and Land Court in Nairobi, the NLC wants Carlisle Development Company Limited stripped of ownership of a 28-acre parcel of land which it says belongs to the public and was allocated to the police in the 1990s and therefore unavailable for private allocation.

The commission has also raised concerns that Carlisle has limited recoverable assets, warning that taxpayers could permanently lose the money if the compensation is paid out and the title is later found to have been unlawfully acquired.

The case marks a new turn for a long-running dispute linked to compensation for land acquired for the Nairobi-Mombasa Standard Gauge Railway, with NLC now directly attacking the developer’s title after suffering setbacks before the Land Acquisition Tribunal and the courts.

The commission has sued Carlisle and joined the Kenya Railways Corporation, the National Police Service and the Attorney-General as interested parties.

Court documents show NLC is seeking cancellation of Carlisle’s title and a declaration that a compensation award of Sh1 billion issued in favour of the company is unenforceable because it was allegedly obtained through fraud and misrepresentation.

According to NLC, the disputed property was originally reserved for the NPS and had been earmarked for construction of a police hospital.

‘The suit property belonged to the second Interested Party and had been set aside for construction of the National Police Service Hospital whose designs were complete. Therefore, the suit property was public land and was not available for alienation to private entities,’ NLC states in its pleadings.

The commission argues that Carlisle’s claim is based on a letter of allotment dated August 27, 1998, whose conditions were never fulfilled within the required period. ‘The plaintiff states that the defendant did not make payment within the prescribed period and only produced a receipt dated December 19, 2014, approximately 16 years after the offer,’ he narrates.

It further claims that by the time the payment was allegedly made, the allotment had already expired and the land was no longer available for allocation.

According to the suit, Carlisle later obtained a title and proceeded to subdivide the land into 136 plots despite the property allegedly being reserved for public use.

The commission says the developer subsequently sought compensation after the government compulsorily acquired the land for the SGR project.

NLC acknowledges that compensation awards amounting to Sh1.654 billion were approved in May 2016 in respect of three parcels, including the disputed property, and that the Ministry of Interior later requested release of the funds to the NPS.

NLC warns that there is an imminent risk of losing public money if the award is enforced. The suit is pending hearing and determination.

However, the commission says Carlisle later moved to the Land Acquisition Tribunal and secured a judgment on February 7, 2025, awarding it Sh712.38 million in compensation and Sh18.75 million in general damages.

With interest accruing from the date of acquisition, NLC says the award has now risen to approximately Sh1 billion.

The commission argues that the tribunal was not told crucial facts concerning the land’s history.

Among the issues allegedly concealed were that the allotment had lapsed, the National Police Service had already been compensated for the property, and the land had been reserved for public purposes.

‘The Plaintiff states that the Defendant’s claim constitutes a fictitious and fraudulent claim against public funds,’ the suit says.

‘There exists a real and imminent risk that public funds amounting to over Sh1 billion will be lost irrecoverably if the defendant is paid,’ it says.

The commission further argues that Carlisle is a ‘briefcase company’ and may be unable to refund the money if the payment is later found to have been made unlawfully.

There is a small town in Laikipia where, this past week, residents stood at the gates of an air base holding placards. The United States, in partnership with the Kenyan government, intends to build a bio-isolation facility there at Nanyuki, a place to quarantine American citizens exposed to Ebola while working across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Washington has committed around $13.5 million toward Kenya’s preparedness. President William Ruto has defended the plan as one of 24 facilities, insisting it will serve Kenyans too. “We know what we are doing,” he said. “People should relax.”

The High Court was less relaxed. It suspended construction twice in one week. Kenya has recorded no Ebola cases. Neighbouring Uganda has reported nine, with one death. The strain driving the outbreak has no approved vaccine. And so the country argues, loudly, about a facility for a disease that has not yet arrived.

Beneath the noise sits an old and uncomfortable question. Who carries the risk, and can the people running the system be trusted to protect those who depend on it? This is not distant news for founders. It is a mirror. Because every founder is, in some quiet way, the system that has built no isolation unit for itself. We pre-position nothing. We assume the body will hold.

We tell ourselves we know what we are doing, that we can push through, that people should relax, even as the court of our own physiology begins issuing its suspensions. Sleep first. Then appetite. Then patience. Then the slow erosion of the very judgment the business depends on.

The founder is the single point of failure in a system that refuses to admit it has one. There is a moment most founders will recognise.

The body begins to signal that it needs to stop. Not next quarter. Now. And the system, the deals mid flight, the payroll due Friday, the investor who wants a call, answers with a flat and total no.

There is no surge capacity. No deputy who can hold the line. No facility prepared in advance for the day the founder goes down. So the founder overrides the signal, performs optimism and keeps moving. Until the signal becomes a symptom.

I have watched what happens when a key person simply disappears from a system for a few days. In any company, when someone goes quiet, the questions begin. Where is he? Is he alright? The absence itself becomes information.

Now multiply that by the weight a founder carries, and you begin to see the real exposure. When a founder goes dark, it is not one desk that falls silent. It is an entire web that begins to ask the same frightened question. This is the part we rarely map honestly. So let us build the full view of who is actually in play when one founder’s health fails.

The employees, whose salaries and whose own families sit downstream of decisions only the founder makes. The customers, who bought a promise of reliability. The suppliers waiting on payment.

The wider community that quietly treats the successful founder as a private insurance fund, a source of black tax and last resort rescue.

And then, almost always uncounted, the one stakeholder the founder forgets to list at all. Every other party gets a line in the risk register. The founder’s own body and mind rarely do.

This is where the operating system many of us carry becomes a diagnostic rather than a slogan. Strategically, indispensability is not strength. It is fragility wearing a crown. A founder who cannot be absent for two weeks has not built a company.

He has built a life support machine that happens to employ people. The strategic work is unglamorous and urgent. A second in command who is genuinely trusted. Authority distributed before a crisis forces the question.

In mindset, the trap is subtler. Indispensability feels like meaning. If everything flows through me, then I matter. But that is a scarcity story dressed as pride, and it quietly guarantees that the moment you fall, everything you built falls with you.

Spiritually, there is a harder reckoning. We say we are building so that others may stand. Yet a system designed around a single irreplaceable person is not built for others at all. It is a monument to our own importance. Legacy is not what collapses when you rest. Legacy is what holds.

So the lesson the Laikipia argument offers founders is almost literal. You do not wait for the disease to arrive before you build the capacity to isolate and recover. You build it while the skies are still clear, because clarity rarely precedes the crisis.

Name the person who can run things for two weeks, then leave for two weeks and let them. Write down what only lives in your head. Take the break before the body schedules it for you, on terms you will not get to negotiate.

Taking care of yourself is not stepping away from the business. For the founder, it is the most serious risk management there is.

The body, like the public, does not believe the press statement. It keeps its own records. And one day, quietly, without asking permission, it presents the bill. The question was never who depends on you. It is whether anything you built can still stand on the day you finally rest.

For millions of Kenyans living at the edges of wildlife habitats, conflict with humans is a perennial threat, attributed to the loss of lives and millions of shillings in damages to infrastructure and agricultural resources.

While official statistics are scant and largely outdated, animal conservation groups estimate that between 200 and 400 Kenyans have lost their lives in encounters with rogue wildlife in the past decade. Many more have been injured or maimed, and the cost to livestock and farmland has been equally devastating.

Analysts point to climate change, with its residual effects of prolonged droughts and floods that have decimated wildlife resources and brought humans and wild animals ever closer together.

The Kenya Wildlife Service last month attributed flooding in the Rift Valley lake ecosystem to rising hippo attacks in the adjacent human settlements, while the drought months of May-June have stoked human-wildlife conflict from elephants and leopards among other animals around large game reserves and forests.

At the same time, compensation has traditionally been slow, in part owing to the cumbersome process of chasing payments that impoverished victims are often subject to, and the lengthy claims verification exercise by state agencies.

In the last financial year, President William Ruto and officials from the tourism and wildlife sector released Sh950 million in compensation payments for victims of human-wildlife conflict, with the government pledging to fast-track future disbursements.

Victims of human-wildlife conflict sometimes wait for years before receiving compensation from the state, and the government pledged to reduce this to a maximum of 90 days.

In the current financial year and into the medium term, the Treasury has further set aside millions of shillings to construct or rehabilitate tens of kilometres of fencing around game reserves, sanctuaries and forests.

While these and other initiatives by the private sector and conservationists are a step in the right direction, they do little to address the underlying causes and long-term impact of human-wildlife conflict.

According to data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, recent wildlife conservation efforts have shown positive outcomes. The population of elephants, Mountain Bongo, Black Rhino and Southern White Rhino has risen significantly from 36,300 thousand in 2021 to 42,100,in 2025.

The endangered 0 populations reached 1,059 and 1,041, respectively, in the same period.

Such numbers ensure that Kenya’s globally renown and rich wildlife diversity is maintained and continues to reap billions in tourism revenue for the country. However, all stakeholders need to adopt a more deliberate and strategic effort to ensure that wildlife resources also benefit the communities living next to them.

In 2024, a parliamentary committee found that rising cases of elephant and leopard attacks around the Rimoi Game Reserve in Keiyo North Constituency for example were exacerbated by inadequate community engagement and awareness in existing wildlife management strategies.

While the community had surrendered their land to set up the game reserve to benefit both the local population and wildlife conservation efforts, these benefits were yet to bear fruit.

Without tangible benefits to the local communities, farmers and homeowners resort to snares, poison and retaliatory killings of rogue wildlife to safeguard their crops and livestock.

This response is however considered more detrimental to the ecosystem while doing little to protect the community from future cases of HWC.

Another strategy that is increasingly becoming popular and gaining traction is building community enterprise resources to create a socio-economic buffer between humans and wildlife in areas prone to conflict.

One such example is the Predator’s Den initiative by regional lender I and M Bank together with partner organisations including German development agency GIZ and the Maa Trust at the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

The Predators Den is a rolling initiative to identify and provide business support to entrepreneurs so they can better position themselves to earn a decent income from resources within their communities such as the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

In the first edition of the initiative, 115 entrepreneurs were taken through training in business planning and financial literacy out of which 20 were shortlisted to pitch their business plans to a group of judges for a chance to secure funding.

Initiatives like this help to bolster community enterprises and address a crucial catalyst for HWC; supporting enterprises linked to conservation and thereby provide an economic incentive for communities living around wildlife resources to safeguard the same.

Other initiatives have seen communities living in areas prone to elephant attacks set up bee-keeping ventures at the edges of their farms.

This capitalises on the elephants’ aversion to bees and provides the community a viable economic opportunity in honey production.

According to data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, KNBS recent wildlife conservation efforts have shown positive outcomes.

Kenya’s elephant population has risen significantly from 36,300 thousand in 2021 to 42,100 thousand in 2025.

One of the most successful films from the 1990s was the Usual Suspects, a crime thriller that introduced the world to Keyser Söze, one of cinema’s most iconic characters.

Both crime lord Söze and the inspiration for the film – a line from the police chief played by Claude Rains in the film noir classic Casablanca – have become synonymous with the futility of unquestioning reliance on blind orthodoxy.

For anyone facing an intractable challenge, rounding up the usual suspects is now shorthand for being seen to do something which everyone accepts will inevitably fail.

I was reminded of this at a recent meeting with a potential unicorn – a billion-dollar AI diagnostics business under pressure from investors to make strategic hires to ease the business’s path to a main market listing.

An interim team was running the place until the nominations committee – which included the former and current chief executives of a couple of high-profile life science companies – found a suitable replacement.

In the meantime, investors watched nervously from the sidelines in the manner of those who have bet the farm on a pair of sevens. What made the meeting remarkable was not the size of the prize, but what it revealed about the failure of the ‘usual suspects’ approach to life science recruitment in the AI age.

All the global executive search giants which currently dominate the C-suite recruitment landscape had failed to convince the investors that they could find suitable candidates. On review, their proposals showed that they were struggling to understand the scale – or even the nature – of the challenge.

That’s why they ended up in a room with me, a small European consultancy with specialist knowledge of the AI sector and 25 years of dirt under my fingernails of placing experts in medical technology.

The proposals I was up against offered the ability to find well-thought-of pharmaceutical and biochemistry generalists. This was fine, except the company needed actual AI diagnostics specialists.

The usual suspects making the pitch were looking to shoehorn in candidates they already knew as generic solutions and failed to show that they had listened to what the client needed or any empirical knowledge of the AI clinical diagnostics sector.

This failure is not entirely down to those well-known recruitment companies. The number of people, globally, who can run a billion-dollar AI clinical diagnostics business – who have experience of managing a listing or even a $100million-plus exit in the sector and, whilst they’re at it, run a 250-person enterprise going gangbusters on commercialisation – is perhaps only a couple of dozen.

This is not hyperbole; it is empirical reality.

The global AI diagnostics market is projected to reach $10.12 billion in 2026, growing at a compound annual rate of 46 percent over the next decade to $209.64 billion by 2034. Yet the talent pool, unsurprisingly, isn’t keeping pace. has not kept pace.

AI, in its current commercial form, has been around for less than a decade, and the number of people with demonstrable AI success in the medical technology sector is a vanishingly small fraction of the total employed.

This scarcity creates a fundamental problem for traditional search firms. Their model depends on volume, on ‘bench strength’, on having a Rolodex of names they can trot out for any assignment.

The usual suspects approach of offering the same polished, pedigreed executives who talk the talk and operate in all the right circles, the inconvenient truth is that looking good and being good are not the same thing.

This critique is not merely anecdotal. Research published in JAMA found that ‘health systems are deploying unproven algorithms with little evidence they improve outcomes – or even do no harm’.

Former FDA commissioner Robert Califf said: “I do not believe there’s a single health system in the United States that’s capable of validating an AI algorithm that’s put into place in a clinical care system.”

The same gap between appearance and reality that plagues AI algorithms plagues executive talent. The usual suspects look like they know what they are doing. That does not mean they do.

External voices

Don’t take my word for it, a 2025 report on talent strategies for precision diagnostics notes that ‘the competition for specialised talent is intensifying across biotech and pharma hubs’ and that ‘job postings for digital pathology, AI in diagnostics, and computational biology have doubled in the past two years’.

Remember that ‘job postings’ in this context are a single-digit percentage of actual need.

The report emphasises that ‘hybrid roles’, combining laboratory and computational backgrounds, are increasingly sought after, and that ‘navigating the regulatory landscape is crucial’.

Similarly, a 2025 analysis of the GenAI healthcare talent market found that “finding talent isn’t the real issue anymore. Managing it is where everything breaks down” .

The report notes that ‘healthcare context is hard to learn’ and that ‘generic contractors don’t bring this context – you spend weeks explaining basics only to churn through them after three months’.

This is precisely the problem with the usual suspects: they bring generic executive credentials but not specific domain expertise.

A recent peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Laboratory and Precision Medicine emphasised that successful AI integration in laboratory medicine requires ‘multidisciplinary collaboration and change management’, noting that ‘building trust towards AI-assisted patient care’ was a crucial challenge.

The empirical advantage

The usual suspects approach is no longer fit for purpose because the traditional recruitment model is fundamentally misaligned with the reality of AI clinical diagnostics.

It offers scale when what is needed is specificity. It offers bench strength when what is needed is deep, longitudinal knowledge of a narrow pool. It offers polished executives from central casting when what is needed is someone who has done this specific thing before.

A different approach is needed. In the age of AI, companies with specific requirements need specialist recruiters with deep, hard-earned experience, who do not claim to know everything about everybody, but who know a few things about the people that matter.

This is not knowledge that can be acquired quickly. It is not knowledge that can be bought off the shelf. It is knowledge that has been earned, year by year, placement by placement in a sector where the talent pool is tiny and the stakes can be huge.