Have you ever wondered why the Kikuyu population revolted against the political dominance of President Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta during the last election, after mindlessly and overwhelmingly voting thrice for him in the 5 years between 2013 -2017? Then it is because they finally realized that he and his family will always selfishly yank the National duvet to cover themselves exclusively on a freezing cold night, leaving the rest of Kenyans dangerously exposed to the elements.
The less said, the better.
It is as though the loins of old man Jomo were cursed and he passed on a genetic marker to his progeny that stored rabid greed, selfishness, hatred for fellow Kenyans, insatiable lust for money and an entitlement to anything and everything in this country.
Heck, the extended Kenyatta family would happily bypass, disregard or even amend the laws of Kenya, if this allowed them to make short-term financial gains, even at the expense of the greater good or regardless whom they trampled over in the process.
Didn’t we see it when they compelled Finance CS Henry Rotich to gazette a waiver on stamp duty on the transfer of shares in their buyout/acquisition of NIC Bank by the Kenyatta-owned CBA, which created the behemoth NCBA?
In Parliament, the Kenyatta’s caused the amendment of the Sports Act 2013 through the Sports (amendment) Bill 2018 and which would later be gazetted as the Sports (Amendment) Act 2019, which was assented to by President Uhuru Kenyatta on 12th June 2019 and came into effect on 2ndJuly 2019.
The Sports Act had been the culmination of years of protracted fights and opposition from the big Sports Federations, which felt that this law was being pushed through in order to clip their wings, since the officials of these Federations run them like their personal fiefdoms.
The most progressive aspect of the Sports Act 2013 was the creation of the Sports Fund, whose sole mandate was the financing of sports activity in Kenya, from National teams, to National leagues and youth development. Another feature of the Sports Fund was the accelerated construction of Sports infrastructure.
The Sports Fund was to be funded exclusively from the taxes, duties and other levies from betting and gaming activities in the country, on a year-on-year basis.
You can therefore imagine the utter shock when the Sports Fund was soon raking in Billions due to the quantum leap in gaming and betting, where in 2017 and 2018, the leading betting firm Sportpesa made annual revenues of Ksh.180 Billion!
The Kenyatta people wanted to get their hands on the Sports Fund and devised a scheme to amend the Act in order to allow them to do so.
The amendment of the Sports Act 2013 to the Sports (Amendment) Act 2019 had several effects. The first was to change the name and scope of the Sports Fund to become the amorphous Sports, Arts and Social Development Fund. This would allow the Fund to expand its activities from purely sporting ones to a whole slew of others.
The 2nd part of the amendments to the Sports Act 2013 (now Sports Act [Amendment] 2019) was that all the cash, assets & liabilities of the Sports Fund were moved to the Central Government control and no longer with Sports Fund Trustees.
What this meant was that this money was now available to be disbursed on the whims of Sports Ministry and Treasury officials, for any reason. These monies fell outside the scope of the Government’s budget and therefore could be accessed without resort to the normal budget and appropriations in Parliament. It was like a secret slush fund within the Government, but only which a select few people knew about.
Kristina Wambui Pratt
The first thing that the vultures did, when the Sports Act was amended and funds moved from the Sports Fund Trustees to the central Government, was to propose for the disbursement of Kes. 1.5 Billion to a company associated with President Uhuru Kenyatta’s sister Kristina Wambui Pratt and which was at the centre of the infamous Mafya House scandal where Ksh. 5 Billion was lost through a nefarious scheme for the procurement of mobile containerized clinics, that were meant to ensure that every Kenyan accessed healthcare.
The containers sourced were cheap, poorly constructed, and grossly overinflated and there was really never any intention of delivering them anywhere or paying their taxes. The containers were thus dumped at the NYS Training Institute at Miritini, Mombasa.
Head of internal audit in the Ministry of Health, Benard Muchere, who first raised the red flag on a possible scandal, was quietly moved from the Health Ministry to a nondescript one as punishment.
The empty containers disguised as clinics, imported by Uhuru’s sister Kristina Pratt.
This family does not care who they roll over, all Kenyans are easily thrown away or disposable like “a bottle cap or a piece of lint”.
Under the pretext that Kristina Pratt was getting a disbursement from the Sports, Arts and Social Development Fund ostensibly to clear taxes on the containers, her company got a further payment of the Ksh. 1.5 Billion and effectively became the first rat to nibble on this cheese.
Kristina Wambui Pratt has been proposed by the Jubilee Party to be a Nominated Senator and the containers continue to rot away at their graveyard in Miritini.
Another example of the depravity of the Kenyatta’s was when they colluded with a Judge of the Court of Appeal to issue a judgement in their favor when no such appeal had been filed in the matter at the CoA in the first place!
We will come back to this story in the next instalment.
Yet, Pres. Uhuru Kenyatta had studiously refused to sign off on the appointment of 41 Judges because he felt that 6 of them were unsuitable for the High Court and CoA due to corruption, a stand-off for 3 years between him and former CJ Daivd Maraga that caused a massive backlog of cases and which affected thousands of Kenyans, whose civil and criminal cases hang in limbo, and whose financial fortunes changed for the worse in that period.
The Kenyatta family runs its business affairs from the Chancery Building on Valley Road which houses ENKE Investments Ltd (thought to be an acronym for –Entire Ngina Kenyatta Investments Ltd).
This site, The Chancery will become a crime scene from the activities that continue there.
This was the company (ENKE investments Ltd) that, in the late 1990s, hired global audit firm PWC to head-hunt or hire at least 20 Indian accountants to take up positions of senior accountants in their various companies.
Blue chip companies in Kenya (Safaricom, KCB, Sportpesa, EABL et al) continue to hire Kenyans exclusively in all cadres of senior positions, and they continue to perform exceptionally well in the region.
What is it about Kenyans that the Kenyatta’s despise so much, that they have absolutely no compunction about trampling us underfoot?
Sociologists educate us that before a group of people can visit an atrocity against another group of people, they have to dehumanize them first. We have seen this all through history.
The Germans in the 1930s and 1940s viewed Jews as “untermensch” (sub-humans) which allowed them to rationalize their systematic annihilation as part of the anti-Jewish pogroms and the ‘final solution”.
Ditto Rwanda where the majority Hutu would refer to the minority Tutsi as “inyenze” (cockroaches) and in the lead-up to the 1994 genocide. By viewing the people as anything else but human, it allows the human brain to rationalize their killing, rapes and plunder.
So too have the Kenyatta’s reduced Kenyans to sub-humans, which in-turn has allowed them to commit financial and economic atrocities against us in general and to specific people in particular.
MUHOHO KENYATTA DRAWS FIRST BLOOD
On 7th July 2019, in the stands at MISC Kasarani, and seated inconspicuously between some well-fed individuals sat President Uhuru Kenyatta’s younger (and only) brother Muhoho ‘Mo’ Kenyatta, the no-nonsense man who singlehandedly steered the family empire for more than 25 years.
Muhoho Kenyatta (left in glasses) and Paul Ndungu (in glasses centre) and Peter Kihanya at the far-right.
Had it been given to his elder brother Uhuru, the family empire would have gone the way of Kenya – to the dogs.
Seated next to “Mo” was Billionaire Paul Ndungu who held a substantial shareholding in Pevans Kenya Ltd (owners of the Sportpesa brand) and promoters of the invitational match between visiting EPL club Everton and Kariobangi Sharks.
On that auspicious day, Paul Ndungu believed that he was seated among friends, having been part of Uhuru Kenyatta’s inner sanctum from the days he headed the 2013 Presidential election bid fundraising committee and the Mt. Kenya Foundation that threw its enormous muscle behind Uhuru’s Presidential bid in 2013 and 2017.
Paul Ndungu did not know how wrong he was.
Unbeknownst to him, “Mo” was seething beneath the calm exterior and forced laughter.
He could not believe that this upstart would dare invite him to this match.
According to close associates, “Mo” believed that it was HE who should have been inviting the likes of Ndungu to such a prestige brand event, considering the 15 years he had religiously pumped money into Thika United Football Club, Kenya Secondary School Sports Association (KSSSA) games and ultimately the East African Secondary School Sports Association (EASSSA) games.
Brookside Dairy sponsorship of KSSSA games.
He had brilliantly structured the KSSSA and EASSSA games to identify budding talent that would then be channeled through Thika United FC (in the Kenya Premier League KPL) and onto the National Team – Harambee Stars.
But here he was now, an invitee to a game that he had spent colossal amounts of money supporting, by a company that was barely 5 years old and with a reported turnover of ksh. 180 Billion.
He had trusted the process, but individuals had let him down.
He had left the management of the club to a childhood friend who did a passable job for a decade, but when the financial windfall from Supersport came to the KPL, he had become overtaken by greed and the money narrowed his vision.
Better days: Brookside sponsorship of Thika United FC.
So badly was the management of Thika United FC distracted by the unexpected windfall from the KPL that they literally stopped all pretence of running the club and went onto accelerated social expansion and side hustles.
In the KPL it was not uncommon to hear that club officials had married 2nd wives and built new homes from the grants given by the KPL. Today the KPL has nothing to its name but memories.
In 2018, the football club was relegated from the Premiership and “Mo” withdrew his sponsorship of the team immediately. The rest, as they say, is history.
The 2nd reason why “Mo” was livid was because he had had the inside track on the gaming and sports betting business some 15 years earlier.
According to a former CEO of the Betting Control & Licensing Board (BCLB), “Mo” had made an application for a sports betting licence (through proxies) in the early 00s, hoping to use the new technology of the time.
However at the time, the BCLB had come under the Chairmanship of one Joe Adongo, a member of former Vice President Moody Awori family and who was saved from penury by his “Uncle Moody” and made BCLB Chairman, when Awori was calling the shots during the Mwai Kibaki government.
At the time, BCLB fell under the office of the VP.
Adongo was unwilling to allow the nascent technology to proceed to trial stage, preferring instead to keep sports betting to physical outlets and kiosks and paper chits.
He had shown an uncanny propensity to hinder development since his days as marketing boss at Kenya Airways and CEO at Nation Newspapers.
But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and we recently saw Joe Adongo’s son, with a budding Rugby and later American Football career meltdown and come apart at the seams after he was axed by his NFL team after an altercation with a woman.
Dan Adongo at his prime and then after his meltdown in the US.
At the time, “Mo” did not go all-out to push for the license, a fact that left BCLB insiders baffled. He probably did not foresee a huge uptake on betting via mobile phones and was probably still riding on an adrenalin high on the stellar performance of his own milk brand – Brookside.
15 years later, it had all come full circle, and a new player had taken the country by storm. Seated in MISC Kasarani on that Sunday afternoon, with a Stadium full of excited fans, “Mo” rued the missed chances and opportunities, the wasted money and the misplaced trust in people.
He was livid…
And if ever he had doubts about fronting a hostile takeover of Sportpesa, they dissipated that warm July afternoon, at the MISC Kasarani.
The Kenyatta family was no longer interested in the Sports Fund. They wanted the whole caper. They did not want the milk in the pail, rather they wanted the whole cow.
However, he has always had the reputation of being Mr. Clean in Kenya’s corporate circles, and to take Sportpesa head-on would muddy the waters and his squeaky clean image in the process.
He needed a set of rough characters, capable of conscience-less action and without a moral compass to boot.
He knew such people, of course.
The extended Kenyatta family did not have a shortage of ruffians, ragamuffins, ingrates, guttersnipe and such other well-meaning members of society.
And he already had 2 such characters in mind.
The first was James Muigai Ngengi popularly known as Jamie (pronounced Jah-may) and who owns “The Hood” establishment behind Chaka Place in Hurlingham. He is light-skinned, vertically challenged, voluble man, with most of his better days behind him than ahead.
James Muigai Ngengi (Jah-may) in President Uhuru Kenyatta’s entourage seen as th3e first civilian after military officers.
After years of wrestling with life and the consumption of wildly copious amounts of alcohol, his skin acquired a permanent tangy tinge, which accentuated his already light colour unnaturally.
This would be the man selected to front the hostile takeover of Sportpesa.
DICK WATHIKA – BRILLIANT SCHEMER & UNTIMELY DEATH
In 2013, at the Fairview Hotel in Nairobi, a meeting had been called between select officials of the Kenya Football Federation (KFF) and the promoters of the sports betting company.
At the meeting was KFF boss Sam Nyamweya and his Deputy Robert Asembo on the one hand, and Dick Wathika and Gerasim Nikolov.
Former Nairobi Mayor the late Dick Wathika. The Kenyatta Family want to dispossess Sport Pesa from his widow.
Apparently they wished to discuss a deal where a brand new betting company –Sportpesa – would get involved in the support of local football as prescribed by the then Betting Act.
Nyamweya probably did not hear a word said about the development of football, likely sizing up the two gentlemen to assess their ability to drop a gunny bag of cash, and be on their way.
Gerasim was definitely flush with cash. He had come from a successful run in partnership with some TV Stations where he ran an SMS lottery by the name 6969.
He had made a shitload of money and it showed.
Previously, he ran a casino at Hurlingham shopping centre, just next to the petrol station.
Gerasim Nikolov: Sportpesa founding co-Director.
He and WaThika were the first subscribers to the Memorandum & Articles of Association of Pevans East Africa Ltd, the beneficial owners of the Sportpesa brand.
The pair would subsequently pick up Paul Ndungu and Ronald Karauri and a few more partners in order to raise the capital required to power the start of the business.
Ronald Karauri is the son of former KANU bigwig Adams Karauri who held the position of Chairman of the KFF caretaker committee between 1988 and 1990, the two years when the Kenyan National Team –Harambee Stars – qualified for the AFCON, when it was an 8-team affair.
Ronald was an Airline pilot and former Secretary General of the Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) before he was fished from obscurity and his ksh. 40 million investment bought him a 6% shareholding in the company + had him nominated to become CEO. Critics say that he mortgaged the interests of the pilots union and traded their grievances with his silence and complicity, allowing the then management headed by CEO Titus Naikuni and members of the political class to cannibalise and collapse Kenya Airways.
Capt. Ronald Karauri with outgoing Amb. Dr. Amina Mohamed.
Today, Ronald Karauri is the Member of Parliament for Kasarani constituency and we understand that he is angling for the Sports committee Chairmanship despite the massive conflict of interest this affords him.
We cannot discuss Dick WaThika without centering on his sudden demise, which we will give full attention later on in subsequent articles.
The sad story of Sportpesa will be told for generations to come, but the telling must do justice to the story and everyone must be held to account for their roles in bringing down an authentic Kenyan brand because someone somewhere believes that there is an upper limit which other Kenyans can make money.
These are the key characters in this sordid tale. The story will be told.
Puh!
1 comment
Mind blowing staff , greed is the hallmark of the dynasties the world over. They seem to all pluck a page from the house of Windsor