Kidney donation must never be corrupted into a transaction driven by poverty and greed.
What speaks of tolerating impunity or protecting wrongdoing more clearly than when the government, instead of instituting criminal proceedings, reaches for its favourite solution: a task force, an inquiry, a committee? It is a tired, predictable, and insulting response to a crisis as grave as organ trafficking.
The damning revelations about Mediheal Group of Hospitals exploitation of vulnerable Kenyans for their organs should have triggered immediate arrests, license suspensions and full criminal investigations — not the establishment of an investigative committee that lacks prosecutorial authority. A credible investigation into a crime of this magnitude must be led by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Let us be brutally honest: this committee will not deliver justice to those who have been exploited, nor will it rewrite Kenya’s outdated, toothless laws on organ transplant. It will not punish those responsible. What it will do is buy time—for the news cycle to move on, for political connections to be activated, and for the machinery of impunity to grind public outrage into dust.
At the heart of this crisis lies the government’s twin failures—not enforcing existing laws and not to implementing the very reforms it claims to have passed.
Strict licensing requirements
Kenya’s Human Tissue Act, passed in 1966, belongs in a museum, not in the statute books of a 21st-century nation. It focuses almost exclusively on deceased persons, with primitive provisions on body part removal. It says nothing about living donors. It contains no safeguards against coercion or exploitation. It lacks any system to license, inspect, or regulate transplant centres. It imposes no criminal penalties for unauthorised organ removal.
Although the Policy on Donation, Transfusion and Transplant of Human Derived Medical Products was issued in 2022, it remains on paper. The policy recognises, in painful detail, that Kenya’s transplant system is dangerously underregulated. It calls for the establishment of an independent national regulatory authority. It promises national registries, tracking systems, strict licensing requirements, independent oversight of transplant centres and criminal sanctions for trafficking and collusion . But two years later, these measures are nowhere.
The Kenya Blood Transfusion and Transplant Service — the agency named to oversee reforms — has no prosecutorial authority, no real inspection powers and no effective coordination between national and county governments . There is no operational national registry for living or deceased organ donors. There is no transplant allocation system to ensure organs are distributed based on need rather than wealth. There are no enforced haemovigilance or organovigilance systems . The private sector operates largely without regulatory oversight, exploiting loopholes.
Kenya already possesses a Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act (2010), which explicitly criminalises trafficking for the purpose of organ removal. Yet even with this modern tool, enforcement remains a mirage. In the face of credible allegations involving big hospitals, the government has resorted to a committee rather than criminal investigations. The message is chilling: some crimes are too politically inconvenient to prosecute.
But Kenya has no shield under international law to evade instituting criminal proceedings against the culprits. Under the Palermo Protocol, Kenya is legally obligated to prevent, criminalise and punish trafficking for organ removal. The Istanbul Declaration on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism—the gold standard in transplantation ethics—is unequivocal: organ trafficking must be prohibited without exception . The Declaration reminds us that the success of transplantation must never justify the victimisation of the world’s poor. It warns that transplant commercialism inevitably targets the most desperate: illiterate persons, refugees, migrants and impoverished citizens. Indeed, the Mediheal scandal is a brutal case study of everything the Istanbul Declaration cautions against.
And yet, the government responds not with outrage, but with paperwork.
Human Tissue Act
Mediheal is not an isolated case. It is a symptom of a hollow regulatory regime, political cowardice and a healthcare system vulnerable to predation. Public outrage may have forced the issue into the spotlight, but if history is any guide, the risk is high that it will soon be buried under endless “consultations” and “reviews,” while the illegal trade continues.
If Kenya is serious about confronting this crisis, reform must begin with a total and urgent overhaul of the Human Tissue Act, coupled with full implementation of the 2022 Donation and Transplant Policy. A reformed legal and regulatory regime must prioritise the expansion of protections for living donors by ensuring that consent is fully informed, voluntary, and reversible. It must create a robust licensing and monitoring system for all transplant centres to uphold standards of safety and ethics. A transparent national transplant registry should be mandated to provide a critical foundation for accountability.
The law must establish clear and severe criminal penalties for unauthorised organ removal, trafficking and collusion by medical practitioners. Furthermore, it must guarantee that the allocation of organs is based solely on medical need, without bias toward financial or social status.
Finally, national systems for haemovigilance, organovigilance, and donor-recipient tracking must be set up and integrated into health information platforms for continuous surveillance, transparency, and rapid response to risks.
But legal reform alone is not enough. Kenya must establish a National Transplant Regulatory Authority—an independent, autonomous body with licensing, inspection, investigation and prosecution powers. It must be well-resourced, insulated from political interference. Above all, we must reclaim the ethical core of transplantation. Organ donation is an act of solidarity, it must never be corrupted into a transaction driven by poverty and greed.
What is at stake is not just medical ethics; it is the very meaning of human dignity. The government must act now. Not with task forces. Not with empty speeches. But with arrests, prosecutions, legal reform and regulatory overhaul. It must act with the urgency and seriousness that a crime against humanity demands. If it does not, then the message will be clear to the world: In Kenya, the poor are not citizens to be protected, they are inventory to be traded.
The writer is a medical doctor. [email protected].
