Railways Boss Philip Mainga Faces The Axe After Scaling Down His Bribe Protection Racket

The walls are finally closing in on Kenya Railways Corporation Managing Director Philip Mainga, and those in the know say the man has only himself to blame.

Word reaching this desk from the upper corridors of power is that the veteran parastatal boss, who has clung to his plum office long after his tenure expired on January 3, 2026, is now staring down the barrel of a very real sack — and the reason is as scandalous as the man’s entire reign at the state corporation.

Sources close to the matter say Mainga has for years bankrolled a sophisticated protection network, quietly dispatching envelopes to board members, politicians of consequence, and influential scribes who might otherwise have raised uncomfortable questions about his extraordinary overstay at Nairobi’s iconic railway headquarters.

The man, it is alleged, was generous to a fault when it served his interests — and for a long time, the system worked like a well-oiled locomotive.

But something has changed.

And those who watch these things very carefully say the man has recently begun tightening the purse strings. The handouts that once flowed so freely have dried up considerably. And in the transactional world of Nairobi’s parastatal politics, cutting the supply is the one unforgivable sin.

“He used to take care of people,” a well-placed source tells Kenya Insights in hushed tones. “Now that he feels the end is near, he’s stopped. And those same people are now talking. Loudly.”

The timing could not be more catastrophic for Mainga. The transport sector is currently in the full grip of a sweeping leadership reshuffle.

Just days ago, the Kenya Rural Roads Authority named Engineer Jackson Karubiu Magondu as its new Director General, effective February 17, 2026, while the Kenya Roads Board simultaneously unveiled Judith Otsyula as its first-ever female Director General.

These back-to-back appointments follow the twin resignations of the KeNHA and KeRRA bosses on the same dramatic day of July 11, 2025.

The message is thunderously clear: the old guard is being swept out, and the powers-that-be are in no mood to grandfather in anyone who has outlived his welcome.

And Mainga, by any honest reckoning, has more than outlived his.

The man first took the Kenya Railways managing director’s seat in acting capacity in August 2018, after his predecessor Atanas Maina was suspended over corruption allegations — a particularly rich irony given what would follow. He was confirmed substantively in January 2020.

His contract was supposed to expire in January 2023, but the board, in a move that the Public Service Commission would later investigate, quietly handed him a second three-year term in a clandestine arrangement struck in the dying days of the Jubilee administration. That extension kept him in office until January 3, 2026.

That date has long since passed. Mainga, now 60, has crossed the mandatory public service retirement age.

He has served beyond two full three-year terms, spent nearly two years acting before being confirmed, and is now a squatter in an office the law says he has no business occupying. Yet there he sits.

The Consumers Federation of Kenya has had enough.

COFEK has instructed its lawyers to seek court intervention over what it describes as Mainga’s flagrant disregard for tenure limits and retirement age regulations.

The organisation argues that where previous petitions stumbled on jurisdictional grounds, this one cuts straight to the bone: no corruption determination is needed, just a plain reading of the law that says this man should have been gone before the new year’s champagne was uncorked.

And the law has a great deal to say about this particular man.

During his years at the helm, Mainga presided over what critics describe as one of the most expensive institutional failures in Kenya’s post-independence history.

The Auditor-General revealed in her report for the year ended June 2024 that Kenya Railways Corporation owes a staggering 737.5 billion shillings to China Exim Bank for the Standard Gauge Railway, a figure that has ballooned from the original 539 billion shillings borrowed, with avoidable penalties and interest of 34.1 billion shillings accumulating because the corporation could not service the debt on time.

On average, Kenya bleeds more than one billion United States dollars every single year servicing that SGR loan alone.

That is before one gets to the land scandals.

Three prime parcels in Mombasa’s Shimanzi area, reserved for railway expansion and valued at over 100 million shillings, were allegedly grabbed and transferred to private developers through forged documents during his watch.

A parcel in that batch reportedly sold for 58.2 million shillings.

At Makongeni in Nairobi, Mainga allegedly leased container yards and buildings unilaterally for a decade without board approval, a move that reportedly cost Kenya Railways over 400 million shillings in lost storage and transport revenue.

Then there is the 88.2 million shilling tender that a legislative committee questioned vigorously: the contract allegedly awarded to First Choice General Supplies, a business said to be controlled by Mainga’s long-term fiancée Peninah Patricks, with allegations that the paperwork was backdated and payments hurried through in contravention of the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act.

The courts have not been a comfortable arena for the man either.

Milimani Commercial Court’s Chief Magistrate Wendy Micheni ordered his arrest in March 2024 for defying a court order that restrained Kenya Railways from evicting a tenant at a Lavington property.

A Nakuru High Court judge found him in contempt for failing to pay Monica Macharia 45.5 million shillings following the illegal demolition of her business premises.

He eventually agreed to pay in instalments, the last due July 2026 — payment defaults would see the matter revert to a civil jail show-cause hearing.

With a court case from COFEK bearing down, a mandatory retirement age already breached, a transport ministry broom sweeping clean, and a protection network that insiders say has started to fray because the money stopped flowing, those in the know say it is simply a matter of time before this particular train pulls into its final station.

The man, those in the know say, is deeply worried.

He had calculated that the recent High Court ruling that struck out a petition seeking his removal — on the procedural basis that the court lacked jurisdiction to interfere in statutory bodies — would buy him enough cover to weather the storm.

The board, buoyed by that ruling, has maintained a thunderous silence, issuing no competitive recruitment notice, no contract renewal, and no succession announcement.

But the gossip from those who matter says the mathematics have changed.

The handouts that kept mouths shut have stopped. The shakeup in the transport sector is too visible and too loud to ignore.

And senior officers inside the corporation — at least one of whom is said to be heavily favoured by the powers-that-be for the top seat — are now positioning themselves openly.

As one seasoned Nairobi insider put it with characteristic bluntness: “You can survive a scandal. You can survive a court case. But you cannot survive stopping to pay people who know where all the bodies are buried.”

Philip Mainga, Kenya Insights has reason to believe, has stopped paying.

The clock, unlike the SGR trains, appears to be running exactly on schedule.