In 1999, Kenya believed it had secured a strategic advantage in the oil trade.
President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria allowed President Daniel Moi’s government to lift 30,000 barrels of crude oil a day under an arrangement presented as both commercially beneficial and diplomatically important. At the time, Kenya was consuming about 35,000 barrels daily, and the promise of access to Nigerian crude at concessionary rates sounded like the kind of deal any energy-starved country would welcome.
The deal was sold as foresight and framed as opportunity. On paper, it was a breakthrough.
The country soon confronted the awkward truth that its refinery in Mombasa, by then it was still running, had been configured to process Murban crude from the United Arab Emirates, not Nigeria’s high-grade Bonny Light. That meant the oil Kenya was entitled to lift could not easily be refined for local use.
So, the arrangement had to be rerouted through agents and the spot market. Parliament was told tenders would be called and that agents would lift the oil on Kenya’s behalf. The government would earn a commission from the sale. That was the last that Kenyans heard the story.
Who, exactly, lifted Kenya’s oil? At what price? How much was sold? How much money returned to the public purse? Why did the accounting seem so thin compared with the scale of the facility?
“What happens is that we are given 30,000 barrels per day. If Kenya can lift that oil and refine it in our refineries for our use, then we can go ahead and do that. However, our refineries cannot meet the requirements for processing Nigerian crude oil,” then Energy Assistant Minister Mwangi Kiunjuri told Parliament.
“So, instead of the Kenya Government losing that facility, it calls for tenders and tenders the facility to agents to lift the oil on its behalf. Then we get a commission, as a government, from whoever wins the tender.”
Former Energy Assistant Minister Mwangi Kiunjuri.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
Years later, scrutiny from the Nigerian side would suggest that the arrangement had become fertile ground for crude theft and a swarm of intermediaries operating as agents, consultants and negotiators. What had begun as a government-to-government facility slowly acquired the atmosphere of an underground market wrapped in official language.
That was one of the earliest signs that Kenya’s petroleum trade was not merely an industry. It was becoming a theatre of secrecy.
Every few years since, other scandals have emerged: a suspicious cargo, a shortage that demands urgent intervention, a disputed consignment, a mysterious loss in the pipeline, a businessman with powerful connections, a regulator insisting that all is well while the figures do not quite add up.
While the faces, the governments, and the agencies change, the basic script remains the same. There is always urgency. There is always opacity. There is always somebody insisting that what looks suspicious is merely complicated.
Years after the Nigerian arrangement exposed the dangers of murky oil diplomacy, another scandal would show how easily private players could bend public infrastructure to private profit.
Businessman Yagnesh Devani at the Milimani Law Courts Nairobi on February 12, 2024.
Yagnesh Devani, a businessman who would later vanish from the country, and then get acquitted , secured a tender to bring in fuel and used Triton Petroleum papers to arrange the imports. Then, with the help of Kenya Pipeline officials and a web of political and commercial influence, 96,000 tonnes of processed petroleum worth Sh7.6 billion were released to Triton without the authorisation of the financiers who held the cargo. By the time banks, traders and regulators understood what had happened, the fuel had been siphoned into the market and Devani was gone.
Triton showed how fragile the safeguards around Kenya’s petroleum system really were. A foreign company, Glencore had tried to use unorthodox means to gain entry into the market via Triton before it burned its fingers. The Court of Appeal later ruled that Glencore had used Triton as a “front, cover and cloak” to trade in Kenya without a licence, the judgment gave a name to what many had already suspected: that in the oil business, paperwork could be a costume.
Some years later, I found myself following another oil trail into the scrubland of Konza, chasing a scandal that seemed, at first, more technical than criminal.
Kenya Pipeline Company was then pressing a startling claim. Large quantities of fuel, it said, had been lost through spills at different points along the pipeline. The losses would have to be absorbed by insurers or passed on, directly or indirectly, to consumers. This was happening as fuel prices kept rising and motorists were being given the usual explanations about global markets and supply pressures.
What they were not being told was that behind those price movements lay claims that vast volumes of petroleum had simply disappeared while under pipeline custody.
Ngong Forest oil leak claim - but no photos
Former Kenya Pipeline Company Managing Director Joe Sang.
Photo credit: Francis Nderitu | Nation Media Group
The oil marketers themselves had begun to question the story. They had met then KPC managing director, Joe Sang, and demanded answers. They were told that 224,000 litres had spilled at kilometre marker 391 on March 2, 2017. They were told that another 1.97 million litres had been lost in 2018 at kilometre markers 392 and 395. Then came the most startling claim: that 1.2 million litres of jet fuel, kerosene and petrol had leaked into Ngong Forest between April and May 2018.
These were not minor figures. These were the sort of losses that should have caused ecological alarm and visible destruction.
When I later met Mr Sang, he repeated the explanation with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation. There were figures, technical descriptions and references to corrosion along the line. But something essential was missing. There were no photographs of the actual spills. No images of earth soaked in petroleum. No evidence of ravaged vegetation. No sign of the environmental trauma that such losses should have produced.
Instead, the Nation went to the ground itself. At Lisa Ranch, the expansive property of former Head of Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary Prof Philip Mbithi, where some of the losses were said to have occurred, the pipeline route was clearly marked. Yet at kilometre marker 391, where KPC claimed 224,000 litres had spilled, there was no evidence of devastation. At the other points, the pattern held.
At the ranch, Prof Mbithi’s farm manager, Moses Parsaoti, told us there was some spillage at the dam which was approximately 120,000 litres — far below the millions being claimed over that stretch.
Oldest trick in the business
Spillage was one one of the oldest tricks in the oil business and had been used over the years to siphon fuel. A loss becomes “line failure.” A questionable release becomes “product evacuation.” A dubious import becomes “market stabilisation.” By the time the words have passed through boardrooms, ministries and regulatory offices, the original act is no longer easily visible. It has been wrapped in jargon and presented as necessity.
Businesswoman Ann Njeri Njoroge at the Mombasa Law Courts on November 14, 2023.
Photo credit: Wachira Mwangi | Nation Media Group
There were rival claims over ownership, public accusations, courtroom battles and the dark suggestion that the oil trade in Kenya is not merely murky, but dangerous. Yet beneath the spectacle lay the same familiar questions: who imported what, aboard which vessel, under what licence, and for whose benefit?
Even in its most theatrical form, Kenyan petroleum scandals rarely depart from their core themes. There is always confusion over ownership. There is always a struggle to establish the true trail of the cargo. There is always an official version that frays under examination.
Seen in isolation, each of these stories can be dismissed as an unfortunate exception. Seen together, they form a historical narrative of an industry that has grown too comfortable with shadow.
The tragedy of Kenya’s petroleum sector is not simply that it has been touched by corruption. It is that corruption has repeatedly been embedded in the way the business is explained to the country. Theft does not always arrive as theft. It comes as a diplomatic arrangement, a pipeline loss, a financing dispute, a licensing irregularity, an emergency importation. It hides inside process. It borrows the language of expertise.
And so the story that began in 1999 with what looked like a diplomatic gift has become, over the decades, a record of something darker: a vital industry repeatedly manipulated by secrecy, protected by complexity and haunted by impunity.
