Embakasi Ranching Company Limited chair Phideli Wangari during the burial ceremony of the company’s former chair James Njoroge at Lironi in Kiambu County on September 5, 2023. She is the first woman to head the controversial land company.
It is now 51 years since Embakasi Ranching Company Limited was founded by then President Jomo Kenyatta as a horticulture and dairy farming venture.
The President had teamed up with his associates, including Njenga Karume and Nairobi legislator Muhuri Muchiri, to consolidate swathes of land in Nairobi, Kiambu and Machakos counties.
By 1978 when Mzee Kenyatta died, the firm had amassed more than 30, 000 acres. It is then that the remaining ‘partners’ opened up membership of the company to their kinsmen to own shares in the spirit of post-independence Africanisation. There are claims the total acreage was under declared and that those behind the scheme pocketed a fortune in eventual tradeoffs out of the deal.
And that was the origin of a corruption vampire that today has claimed numerous lives in the raging insatiable appetite for land grabbing that has left in its wake disillusioned elderly shareholders, some in their late 90s.
Many have died waiting for their share of the vast land and thousands of their descendants are queuing to get title deeds as powerful wheeler dealers obstruct the process for selfish gain.
A wall fencing the offices of Embakasi Ranching Company Limited in Ruai on February 24, 2021.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
All four chairmen who have served in the ranch so far have died of heart attacks. In their last days they exhibited signs of paranoia, exposing the viciousness linked to the fight for control of the vast prime land and the huge revenues collected from poor shareholders.
The latest chairman, James Njoroge, died on August 26, aged 72. He was buried on September 5.
Mr Njoroge was succeeded by Phideli Wangari, the first woman to head the controversial land company.
She spoke about the ranch, her fears, the intrigues and the way out of the mess that is the ranch.
Who is Phideli Wangari?
She is just a simple woman aged 48, a theologian with a background in business management. A wife, a mother of three adults and a philanthropist who loves people, especially the vulnerable.
