Construction Of Stalled Yaya Center Block Resumes After More Than 3 Decades and The Concrete Story Behind It

NAIROBI — For three decades, it stood as Nairobi’s most expensive monument to corporate vengeance. The Yaya West Wing building, a skeleton of concrete and steel adjacent to the bustling Yaya Centre shopping mall, has haunted Kilimani’s skyline since 1992, a silent witness to one of Kenya’s most dramatic business feuds.

But now, after 32 years of abandonment, the cursed tower is finally coming back to life.

JW Marriott has taken on what many construction experts privately called impossible: a complete renovation of the West Wing that promises to transform the doomed structure into a luxury hotel.

The story behind the stalled tower reads like a John le Carré thriller mixed with a Shakespearean tragedy.

It begins with Nicholas Kipyator Biwott, the man Kenyans knew as Total Man, one of the most powerful and feared politicians in Daniel arap Moi’s government.

His nickname, the Bull of Auckland, came from an embarrassing diplomatic incident in New Zealand during a Commonwealth Heads of State Meeting in the 1990s. GG Kariuki teased him with it in Parliament after a housekeeper accused him of indecency.

The incident became a diplomatic crisis that the foreign affairs ministry eventually doused, but not before it became fodder for endless jokes about how the Bull nearly mounted a hapless innkeeper.

Total Man, or Karnet as Kalenjins called him (meaning Ironbar), was as intelligent as he was ruthless.

In the early 1990s, he partnered with Israeli businessman Gad Zeevi to construct the Yaya Centre and its twin tower through their company, HZ Group.

They founded the project with grand ambitions, securing financing through Trade Bank, a financial institution that the Kassam brothers had started but which Biwott and Zeevi owned 75 percent of.

The arrangement was lucrative but convoluted.

Trade Bank had advanced Biwott 900 million shillings that he never repaid.

To cover their tracks, they borrowed money from the Deposit Protection Fund supposedly for Trade Bank’s own building but charged Yaya Towers Ltd’s assets instead.

It was business done chini ya maji, under the water, away from scrutinizing eyes.

But money has a way of exposing secrets.

When the Kassam brothers started demanding repayments, they quickly learned that in 1990s Kenya, your freedom and rights were on loan from the deep state.

Alnoor Kassam was given three options: be deported, walk away, or forget the money. He fled to Canada and never returned.

With the Kassams out of the picture, you’d think the partnership would sail smoothly.

Instead, it combusted spectacularly. Zeevi accused Biwott of playing cards under the table regarding their jointly owned companies.

Fearing for his safety, Zeevi brought in reinforcements: his friend Vaizman Aharoni and David Kimche, an Israeli spy master.

Both men were reportedly Mossad operatives, brought in as friends and associates but really serving as protection.

Biwott’s paranoia, legendary even before this, went into overdrive.

The man who never traveled in marked Mercedes or Pajeros, who never ate food served at high table events unless he could swap it with common servings, now had Israeli intelligence circling his empire.

He would use five different cars to reach one destination, starting his journey in one vehicle and ending in a completely different one.

Nobody ever knew which car carried the Total Man.

The partnership was doomed. Around 1995, with construction of the West Wing building still incomplete and tensions at a breaking point, the Israeli partners decided to cut their losses. But they wouldn’t leave quietly.

Fearing for their own lives as they too were being trailed, Aharoni instructed the Israeli contractor on site to abandon the property.

But before leaving, the contractor received one final, devastating order: pour concrete into every elevator shaft, every drainage system, every functional waterway, and every stairwell.

A random column of concrete was run haphazardly through the building’s core.

It was architectural assassination.

The West Wing became utterly useless, a building that couldn’t be completed without demolishing it entirely down to the basement.

And because it shared property titles with the operational Yaya Centre, even demolition was nearly impossible.

The Israelis left Kenya having served sweet revenge on the Bull of Auckland.

For 32 years, the building remained frozen in time.

Biwott died in July 2017, taking the full story with him.

The Kassam who fled to Canada never returned. Smith Hempstone, the US Ambassador whom Biwott had expelled from Kenya and pursued with litigation until the diplomat went bankrupt and died in 2006, was long gone.

The Israelis had vanished. But their concrete curse remained, looming over Kilimani like a ghost.

Then in July 2023, everything changed. The Biwott family sold the entire Yaya complex, including the cursed West Wing, to a consortium led by the billionaire Kantaria family.

The amount was never disclosed, but rumors put it in the billions of shillings.

The Kantarias, already major players in Kenya’s hospitality industry with properties like the Radisson Blu Arboretum Hotel and Capital Centre Mall, saw opportunity where others saw only obstruction.

They brought in JW Marriott, part of Marriott International’s luxury portfolio, to tackle what many considered an engineering nightmare.

The renovation work is proving every bit as challenging as expected.

According to sources close to the project, it’s pretty difficult work. There’s a new piping system, HVAC, everything. Lots of demolitions too. Renovations are hard, they say, especially when you’re essentially undoing deliberate sabotage from three decades ago.

The project requires builders to work around or remove the concrete that was meant to make the building unusable forever.

Every system must be rebuilt from scratch.

The sabotage must be carefully extracted without compromising structural integrity or disturbing the adjacent shopping mall and hotel operations that continue humming along next door.

It’s a delicate dance of destruction and reconstruction carried out in one of Nairobi’s most prime locations, where any misstep could cascade into massive complications.

Yaya West Wing building that had remained incomplete for over three decades.

The timing tells you something about confidence.

JW Marriott opened its flagship Nairobi property in Westlands in March 2024, a 35-story, 315-room hotel that became the tallest in Kenya.

Their commitment to the Kenyan market appears unwavering.

Transforming the Yaya West Wing represents both an engineering challenge and a statement of intent about where they see Nairobi’s hospitality sector heading.

Meanwhile, the existing Yaya Hotel & Apartments in the completed tower has undergone its own transformation.

After the 2023 acquisition, the property was fully revamped from top to bottom, with renovated lobbies, amenities, and some of Nairobi’s largest luxury rooms ranging from 1,076 to 3,000 square feet.

The entire complex is being repositioned for a new era.

As construction crews work to undo what was done in 1995, they’re not just renovating a building. They’re exorcising ghosts.

The Yaya West Wing has loomed over Kilimani for more than three decades as a testament to what happens when powerful people clash, when paranoia meets ambition, when revenge is served in concrete rather than on plates.

The building was meant to stand forever as a monument to spite.

Instead, it’s being transformed into a luxury destination. Guests who eventually check in will sleep in rooms built on a foundation of espionage, sabotage, and one of the most bizarre property disputes in Kenyan history.

They probably won’t know that the elevator carrying them to their floor once had its shaft filled with concrete by a contractor acting on orders from Israeli operatives fleeing a Kenyan power broker’s wrath.

In Nairobi’s ever-evolving skyline, some buildings rise quickly and fade into obscurity. Others take 32 years and require exorcising corporate ghosts before they can fulfill their purpose.

The Yaya West Wing belongs to the latter category.

The concrete that was meant to bury this building forever is finally being chipped away, one hammer strike at a time.

What was once Kenya’s most expensive monument to vengeance is becoming something else entirely: a hotel, a luxury space, a new beginning built on top of old grudges.

The Bull of Auckland is long dead. The Israelis are long gone. The Kassams never came back. But their building, that cursed tower that shouldn’t have survived, is finally being given the life it was always supposed to have.

The Yaya Centre complex sits on Argwings Kodhek Road in Kilimani, approximately 3.4 kilometers from Nairobi’s city center.

JW Marriott hasn’t announced a completion timeline for the West Wing renovation, but construction is underway. After three decades of silence, the building is finally making noise again. This time, it’s the sound of jackhammers and hope.

Artistic impression of Yaya Center.