Tuju Forcefully Removed From His Karen Property With Masked Officers In Unmarked Vehicles In Early Morning Raid

The first sign that something was wrong came just after midnight. Vehicles without registration plates began assembling on the access roads near Karen’s Ngong Road junction.

By 2am, a force of more than 50 armed men, some in police uniform and others in balaclavas, had pushed through the gates of Dari Business Park and locked every employee of Tamarind Restaurant outside the premises.

Former Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju, roused from sleep at his adjacent home, walked out to find a small army in possession of his property. The army refused to say who had sent them.

It was a spectacular, and violent, ending to a legal saga that has consumed the former Jubilee Party secretary-general for the better part of a decade.

Tuju filmed himself from outside his own gate at 3:30am, speaking directly to the camera in a video that spread across social media before most of Nairobi had woken up.

“I have been kicked out by armed police officers who came in six unidentified vehicles. This is pure impunity because they have no court orders to conduct such a raid.”

Tuju said the officers communicated with each other in their mother tongue, shielded their faces each time he raised his phone, and told him only that they were following orders from above. When he demanded to see court documents authorising the eviction, he was told there were none. “This is not law,” he said. “If it is law, it is the law of the jungle.”

To understand what happened in the darkness of Karen on Saturday morning one must go back to 2014, when Raphael Tuju, then a media millionaire with ambitions that matched the size of his real estate dreams, fixed his eye on a 22-acre forested estate along Tree Lane in Karen.

At the heart of the property stood a Victorian-era bungalow built by Scottish missionary Dr Albert Patterson more than a century earlier.

The building had been preserved with almost religious care, its 60-year-old refrigerator still running, a gramophone in the parlour, Dr Patterson’s original furniture in place and the forest canopy unbroken overhead. Rooms were let at Sh43,000 a night for honeymooners.

Tuju’s plan was to transform the estate into the kind of establishment that would rival Windsor Golf Hotel or Hemingways on Mbagathi Ridge: boutique accommodation, a high-end restaurant named Tamarind Karen, a wellness sanctuary called Entim Sidai, and a ring of luxury residential villas at Sh100 million each.

The vehicle was his company Dari Limited, and the financier was the East African Development Bank.

On April 10, 2015, EADB disbursed Sh943.9 million, the equivalent of 9.3 million US dollars, to Dari Limited under a facility agreement that named Tuju, his three children Mano, Alma and Yma, and a related company, S.A.M Company Limited, as guarantors.

The properties along Tree Lane, Ngong Road and Mwitu Road in Karen were charged as security. The first interest payment fell due in October 2015. Dari paid it. It would be the only payment EADB ever received.

What followed, in Tuju’s telling, was a cascade of broken promises. EADB had committed to a second tranche of Sh294 million for the construction of the residential units but declined to release those funds, Tuju has alleged, because the bank wanted additional security over an Upper Hill property already pledged to the Bank of Africa.

Without the second disbursement, he argued, the project unravelled and with it his ability to service the debt. EADB disputes the account and courts in London agreed with the bank, ruling that the second facility was discussed but never formally agreed and therefore never owed.

In December 2018 EADB invoked the dispute resolution clause in the original facility agreement and sued Dari Limited and its guarantors before the High Court of Justice in London. Judge Daniel Toledano ruled against Tuju in July 2019, ordering repayment of more than 15.1 million US dollars, equivalent at the time to well over Sh1.5 billion.

Tuju’s appeal before Lord Justice Leggatt was dismissed. By the time the Kenyan courts adopted the UK judgment in February 2020, the debt had grown further through accumulated interest and currency movements.

Tuju responded by opening every legal front available to him. He challenged the adoption of the UK judgment in the Kenyan High Court and lost. He fought at the Court of Appeal and lost again. He petitioned the Supreme Court, sought to have Supreme Court judges removed before the Judicial Service Commission, was barred from the apex court on procedural grounds, and eventually filed a case at the East African Court of Justice in Arusha.

In Nairobi he accused senior advocates of fabricating affidavits and colluding with the bank’s former Kenya country manager to deceive multiple courts. He filed criminal complaints with the DCI and the ODPP. He told courts that a Dubai investor identified as ZLivia had been willing to inject fresh equity into the project but that EADB had blocked the deal, and that KCB Group had been ready to take over the loan but was similarly obstructed.

Through every round of litigation, temporary court orders and injunctions kept auctioneers at bay. EADB fought back, seeking to have Tuju and his three children jailed or fined for contempt of court, and filing bankruptcy proceedings against them individually.

PricewaterhouseCoopers partners Muniu Thoithi and George Weru were appointed receiver managers over Dari Limited in December 2019, though that appointment was successfully contested for a period. The debt, which started at 9.3 million dollars, had by 2026 grown to the equivalent of Sh4.5 billion according to EADB.

Tuju disputes the figure and argues the bank’s running total is inflated by punitive default interest applied in bad faith.

The final chapter opened on Monday, March 9. Justice Josephine Wayua Mong’are of the Milimani Commercial Court struck out Dari Limited’s amended plaint, ruling that the issues raised had already been determined across multiple forums and were substantially res judicata.

The court vacated the injunctions that had since October 2024 barred Garam Investment Auctioneers and Knight Frank Kenya from advertising, attaching or selling the Karen properties. The road to auction was open.

On Wednesday night, March 11, more than 100 men arrived at Dari Business Park on motorbikes. Tuju, who had received no notice, walked out to find strangers claiming the property had a new owner and demanding he vacate immediately.

He stood his ground, filmed the confrontation and called Karen Police Station. Officers arrived and restored order. He filed a report, returned inside and believed the matter would be addressed in court. Then came Saturday.

The force that arrived in the early hours of March 14 was a different kind of operation altogether. Tuju has suggested, based on the equipment carried and the coordination on display, that the unit included elements of the Rapid Response Unit, the elite GSU formation based at Ruiru that handles the most sensitive internal security operations in the country.

The Kenya Police Service had not confirmed which unit carried out the operation by the time of publication, and no statement had emerged from the Inspector General’s office.

According to Tuju’s account, corroborated by videos he recorded at the scene, the officers arrived in at least seven vehicles, several without registration plates. Some wore full police uniform.

Others had covered their faces with balaclavas. When Tuju approached, officers turned away from his camera. When he asked for court orders, he was told there were none. When he asked who had given the orders, he was told only that the orders came from above.

Restaurant staff and security guards employed at Tamarind Karen were pushed outside the gates. The officers locked themselves inside the compound. Tuju stood at his own perimeter wall in the dark as more vehicles arrived and dawn was still hours away.

“They will have to kill me and bury me in Rarieda. Entim Sidai, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park will only change hands over my dead body.”

In the video Tuju addressed his children Mano, Alma and Yma by name, telling them he was protecting the family business and would not give way to what he described as state-backed criminality. “First of all, I would like to encourage my children, who I know will be watching this video, that I am only protecting my family business which belongs to my family,” he said.

The Karen raid did not occur in isolation. Earlier on Wednesday evening, Fairways Hotel in Kisumu, owned by former Principal Secretary Irungu Nyakera, was attacked by a group of men who caused damage worth millions of shillings and assaulted security staff. Nyakera attributed the attack to political opponents and fired warning shots into the air to disperse the intruders.

DCI Director Amin Mohammed, speaking at the Police Leadership Academy in Nairobi on Thursday during a national security commanders meeting, confirmed that several suspects from both incidents had been arrested. “Goons are criminals, and we have no place for criminals,” Amin said, adding that those already identified had been arraigned in court while efforts to identify others were continuing.

Internal Security Principal Secretary Raymond Omollo echoed the position, saying the government would not tolerate violence or hooliganism and promising legal accountability for perpetrators. Neither official addressed the Saturday operation at Dari Business Park, which by all accounts involved uniformed officers rather than private goons.

On Friday, March 13, the day before the raid, Tuju walked to the Supreme Court building and delivered a letter personally addressed to Chief Justice Martha Koome.

Speaking to journalists outside, he said he had chosen institutions over retaliation. “I have come to the judiciary today only with a letter and not with goons,” he said. “If you allow our country to go the goons way then we will be heading to anarchy, chaos, in other words, a failed state.”

The letter, copies of which were submitted simultaneously to the DCI, the EACC and the ODPP, alleged that a sitting judge in the Commercial Division of the High Court had been approached by a broker, a former judge and a lawyer who sought Sh10 million in exchange for influencing the outcome of his pending appeal.

Tuju said the three individuals were arrested after they visited his Karen home and made the bribery pitch. He named them in separate communications to investigative agencies.

On March 12, Justice Mong’are, leaving the division on transfer, declined to grant interim conservatory orders that would have halted the auction pending the appeal but certified the matter as urgent and granted leave to appeal.

The next hearing before the presiding judge of the division was scheduled for March 17. With his property already occupied by officers who arrived in the night and declined to leave, it is not immediately clear what relief that hearing can provide.

Tuju’s legal resistance has been nothing short of exhausting to document. He has fought in courts in London, Nairobi and Arusha. He has used every procedural mechanism available: injunctions, stays, contempt applications, constitutional petitions, criminal complaints and judicial integrity petitions.

He has accused lawyers of fabricating affidavits, accused judges of soliciting bribes, accused the bank of predatory lending and accused auctioneers of operating without proper authority. He has prevailed in isolated procedural battles while losing the broader war of attrition. What he had never done, until Saturday morning, was physically lost possession of the property.

The question being asked across Kenya’s legal and political establishment on Saturday is whether the operation was a lawful enforcement of a judgment obtained across multiple courts over eleven years, or whether the deployment of what appeared to be state security forces to execute a commercial debt recovery in the dead of night, without presenting court orders to the registered owner, amounts to an extrajudicial action that should alarm every property holder in the country. Tuju himself has framed the issue as nothing less than a constitutional test. “This is not law,” he said, standing alone outside his locked gate in the dark. “If it is law, it is the law of the jungle.”