THE FUEL CABAL: How Mohamed Jaffer, a KPC Insider, and a Ministry Official Are Alleged to Have Manufactured Kenya’s Worst Petroleum Crisis in Three Years, While Kenyans Burned

A war in the Middle East. A tanker riding low in the water. A government letter signed in 48 hours. And a Sh11.8 billion payday waiting at the other end.

That, in essence, is the anatomy of what Narok Senator Ledama Ole Kina is now calling the most brazen act of energy-sector looting in Kenya’s modern history.

The senator has a name for it: a fuel cabal. And in a bombshell statement delivered to President William Ruto and amplified before the Senate Energy Committee, he has given it three faces.

Joel Mburu, Supply and Logistics Manager at the Kenya Pipeline Company. Joseph Wafula, Deputy Director of Petroleum at the Ministry of Energy. And Mohammed Jaffer of One Petroleum Limited , the Mombasa tycoon whose family dynasty stretches back to a trading office in Zanzibar in 1860, and whose grip on the chokepoints of Kenya’s port, grain trade, and energy sector is without precedent among private individuals in this country.

Former Petroleum Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban, the senator says, is in Ole Kina’s precise formulation, collateral damage.

The scandal that has consumed Kenya’s energy sector since late March 2026 is not a story about rogue officials acting alone.

It is a story about a system so deeply captured that it could manufacture a national emergency to order, procure substandard fuel at triple the government rate, discharge it at the Port of Mombasa during a public holiday weekend, and very nearly pump it into the tanks of millions of Kenyan motorists before anyone in authority thought to ask how a cargo with elevated sulphur, manganese, and benzene content had acquired all the official stamps it needed to enter the country in under 72 hours.

The senator is not speaking in whispers. He is speaking on the floor of a committee room, and what he is reading from are emails.

THE CRISIS THAT WASN’T

On March 9, 2026, a crisis meeting under the National Security Council Committee was chaired by Chief of Staff and Head of Public Service Felix Koskei at the Office of the President.

The catalyst was the escalating war in the Middle East, specifically Iran’s attacks on oil facilities in the Gulf region that had effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a significant share of the world’s petroleum transits daily. When the route closed, a vessel carrying 114.7 million litres of petrol from Emirates National Oil Company was unable to leave Jebel Ali, leaving a gap in Kenya’s supply chain that the Ministry of Energy scrambled to fill. 

The meeting, according to official documents seen by this publication, instructed Petroleum Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban to seek alternative fuel sources beyond the Gulf region. Kenya had been sourcing petroleum from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates under a Government-to-Government framework introduced in 2023, following the catastrophic shortages of 2022.

The G2G framework, backed by sovereign guarantee and a 180-day credit facility, was designed to stabilise supply against global price volatility and ease the acute foreign exchange pressure of 2022 and 2023.  It had worked. Until now.

The instruction from Koskei’s meeting was, in the words of a subsequent official letter, to diversify fuel sources rather than suppliers. That distinction, small on paper, would become enormous in practice. Because what followed was not a diversification of sources

It was, according to Senator Ole Kina and the investigative record now assembled before Parliament, a deliberate manipulation of fuel stock data to create the appearance of a shortage severe enough to justify emergency procurement that bypassed every safeguard the G2G framework had put in place.

Investigations show officials at the Ministry of Energy had on March 18, 2026, sent memos indicating there would be a fuel shortage over the Iran war.

That memo was the beginning of an official paper trail that would end with a cargo of chemically non-compliant petrol, imported at three times the government rate, sitting in Kenya Pipeline Company infrastructure and being invoiced to oil marketing companies who were told, in writing, that they had no choice but to buy it.

The senator puts it starkly: “How could they procure cargo, complete manifests, secure letters of credit, and handle all documentation in mere hours? This timeline suggests premeditated planning and an orchestrated crisis, with fuel suspiciously hanging around Mombasa beforehand.”

THE THREE NAMES

Joel Mburu is not a name familiar to the public. But inside the Kenya Pipeline Company, he served as Supply and Logistics Manager , a role that placed him at the precise intersection of fuel inventory data and import authorisation. In Kenya’s petroleum architecture, KPC is the spine of the entire system. It owns the storage tanks.

It controls the pipeline. It records what is in stock and what is needed. A person who controls the data on in-country fuel stocks, and who chooses to alter that data, holds in their hands the power to conjure a crisis from thin air.

Investigators arrested Kiptoo, Sang, Liban, and Petroleum Deputy Director Joseph Wafula on suspicion of manipulating in-country fuel stock data to trigger the emergency purchase.  Mburu, though not initially in custody, was described by an official aware of the probe as “a key person in this issue” who had yet to record his statement.  Administrative action against him was initiated by Head of Public Service Felix Koskei.

Joseph Wafula, as Deputy Director of Petroleum at the Ministry of Energy, sat one step above the technical teams that assess supply gaps and recommend procurement actions. Wafula was among officials now facing internal disciplinary processes as authorities expanded scrutiny into the alleged manipulation of fuel stock data.

His resignation was announced weeks after the scandal broke, as investigators closed in on the full paper trail connecting his office to the approvals that let the One Petroleum cargo enter the country. He had been one of the first officials taken in for questioning, released on police cash bail of Sh100,000  as investigators raced to locate the remaining twenty-six persons of interest.

Mohamed Jaffer, now 78, is in a different category entirely. He is not a bureaucrat. He is not a regulator. He is the man who, when the manufactured crisis produced an emergency tender, was ready.

One Petroleum, a subsidiary of Mombasa billionaire Mohammed Jaffer’s Mbaraki Bulk Terminal, was among just two local firms cleared by the Ministry of Energy to import 60 tonnes of petrol each outside Kenya’s existing government-to-government deal with three Gulf oil majors. 

The question Senator Ole Kina is asking is the one that cuts to the bone: how does a company with no track record of importing Premium Motor Spirit respond to an emergency tender on March 25 and deliver a 68,000-tonne cargo by March 27? Letters of credit take days. Cargo manifests take days. Ship charters take days. The MT Paloma, the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker that docked at Mombasa port on March 27, was not chartered in 48 hours. It was positioned in advance. Its last known port before Mombasa was Fujairah in the UAE, where the cargo had been assembled and loaded long before any emergency was officially declared in Nairobi.

THE MAN BEHIND THE EMPIRE

To understand Mohamed Jaffer, you must understand Mombasa port. Because to a very significant degree, they are the same thing.

Born in 1948 in Mombasa, Jaffer is the chairman of the MJ Group, with operations in bulk cargo handling, grain terminals, petroleum storage, fuel importation, and liquefied petroleum gas distribution. According to the Africa Report 2025, the MJ Group is valued at approximately KSh16.3 billion.  The tycoon secured grain-handling approvals in 1992 at the Port of Mombasa after eight years of effort, transforming the processing of imports and reducing costs for East African markets.

From that foothold, he built an empire. Today, Grain Bulk Handlers controls the bulk of Kenya’s liquefied petroleum gas imports and dominates the LPG transit market to neighbouring countries. Mbaraki Bulk Terminal handles multi-petroleum product storage at the port. 

One Petroleum Limited, established in November 2010, is a subsidiary of that Mbaraki Bulk Terminal. Corporate filings show the company’s directorship includes Solomon Esebwe Mwanjumwa Ondego, Mujtaba Mohamed Jaffer, Ali Abbas Jaffer, Mohamed Husein Jaffer, and Ali Salaah Balala, while Nicholas Kokita serves as the company secretary.  In practice, this is a family company. Jaffer’s sons sit on its board. Its assets sit on his port. His terminal stores the fuel it imports.

The documents further show the presence of Mbaraki Holdings Limited, a Mauritius-registered entity listed as a shareholder, holding 41,098 ordinary shares, which introduces an offshore financial component that investigators say is often used to obscure beneficial ownership and move money across jurisdictions beyond the reach of local regulators.

An analysis reveals that One Petroleum’s encumbrances schedule in the Companies Registry reveals an extraordinarily heavy debt load, with two specific debentures dated September 2, 2024, each securing USD 95,000,000, and two deeds of assignment of receivables together securing another USD 395,000,000.

A company operating within that kind of financial architecture is not a small operator playing at the margins of Kenya’s fuel market. It is a systemically positioned entity whose financial structures, investigators note, are capable of moving billions of shillings through Kenya’s petroleum supply chain.

Jaffer’s political footprint is as wide as his commercial one.

He has been linked to political activities by ODM party leader and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, President William Ruto, and former Mombasa senator Hassan Omar.

Reports indicate that Mr Jaffer sponsored Mr Odinga in his 2013 presidential bid before they had a falling-out.  In the run-up to Kenya’s 2022 presidential elections, it was reported that Jaffer backed veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga.

After the elections, there were signs that the current administration was warming to a cordial relationship with the billionaire.

On October 20, 2023, he was among the heroes honoured by President Ruto at a ceremony held in Nairobi.  Jaffer has maintained connections across successive Kenyan administrations since the era of President Daniel arap Moi. 

The political realignment, it appears, paid dividends. Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority Director General David Kiptoo subsequently disclosed in a television interview that One Petroleum and Asharami Synergy had been incorporated into the G-to-G framework, expanding the number of participating Kenyan oil firms from three to five.

Jaffer’s company had moved from emergency outside importer to formal participant in the country’s strategic fuel supply arrangement.  The emergency of March 2026, in other words, was not the beginning of One Petroleum’s relationship with the state. It was the culmination of a positioning strategy years in the making.

THE CARGO THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE DOCKED

On March 25, PS Liban wrote to One Petroleum Ltd’s director Ali Balala and Oryx Energies CEO Angeline Maangi, allowing them to import 60,000 tonnes of petroleum each, with a permitted overrun of up to ten per cent.

That letter was the formal beginning of a procurement process that would cost Kenyans dearly. A 60,000-metric-tonne consignment under the G2G framework would have cost Sh8.4 billion.

One Petroleum’s consignment was priced at Sh198,000 per tonne, compared to Sh140,000 per tonne under the G2G arrangement, an increase of Sh58,000 per metric tonne, which would have resulted in an approximate rise of Sh14 per litre in pump prices. 

The price was not the only problem. PS Liban wrote to KEBS Managing Director Esther Ngari requesting a temporary waiver on the requirement for a certificate of conformity and parameters on the certificate of quality of refined petroleum products, citing disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. The letter was copied to CS Wandayi.

Trade CS Lee Kinyanjui subsequently granted the waiver in a letter dated March 28, with the remarkable written acknowledgement that the petroleum aboard MT Paloma carried “high levels of manganese, sulphur and benzene.” These are not minor quality deviations. Benzene is a known human carcinogen. Elevated manganese degrades catalytic converters. High sulphur corrodes engines and raises toxic roadside emissions.

Every motorist who filled their tank from a station supplied by this consignment was, without their knowledge, an unwitting participant in an experiment with their own vehicle and their own health.

The MT Paloma docked in Mombasa on March 27 at approximately 4.14pm and left on March 30.  By the time the DCI arrested the principal energy officials on the night of April 2, the cargo had already been discharged and invoiced.

Motorists had already been raising alarm about fuel quality even before the scandal broke publicly, with reports of engine damage linked to contaminated petroleum products circulating in the weeks before the DCI arrests. 

Preliminary findings indicate the fuel originated from Saudi Aramco before being sold to a separate international firm and redirected through a local Kenyan importer.

The diversion of Aramco-sourced fuel through a chain of intermediaries before landing in Kenya outside the G2G framework is significant. It means the cargo did not originate as a bespoke emergency purchase. It was pre-positioned, waiting for the crisis to be declared, ready to move the moment the authorisation letters were signed.

THE CABAL’S PRICE LIST

Senator Ole Kina’s most explosive allegation is not about the One Petroleum consignment. It is about what he found when he sat in the Senate committee room and read the emails.

Ole Kina told senators he had reviewed internal correspondence between Oryx Energy Ltd and officials at the Ministry of Energy, including the Cabinet Secretary, and discovered they were all in agreement to import fuel at USD 253.94 per metric tonne, while the same government imports fuel at USD 84.00 per metric tonne.

The differential is not a rounding error. It is a markup of approximately 202 per cent above the government’s own contracted rate. If applied to Kenya’s monthly requirement of 180,000 metric tonnes, the pricing gap in that single arrangement would represent a transfer of approximately Sh60 billion per year from Kenyan consumers to the beneficiaries of the deal.

Ole Kina further alleged that attempts to challenge such deals are often undermined by last-minute changes that still result in costly imports, and cited a separate incident involving One Petroleum Limited, claiming that a shipment of substandard fuel was offloaded despite initial objections, at a significantly inflated cost. 

The Oryx angle is critical because it reveals the scandal’s true scope.

One Petroleum was not the only company cleared to import outside the G2G framework during the alleged emergency. Correspondence seen by the Nation showed that Swiss-owned Oryx Petroleum had also ordered 60,000 tonnes of petroleum in a similar arrangement to that of One Petroleum.

The Oryx consignment was expected to arrive in Mombasa within days of the One Petroleum cargo.  Two companies. Two cargoes. Two sets of inflated prices. And both of them enabled by the same cluster of officials at the Ministry of Energy and Kenya Pipeline Company.

Senator Ole Kina, as a member of the Senate Energy Committee, stated that Kenya’s monthly requirement for PMS stands at about 180,000 metric tonnes, yet the G2G arrangement was that day offloading 36,000 metric tonnes, with an additional 180,000 metric tonnes expected within the next two weeks.

The country, in other words, was not short of fuel at all. The shortage that justified the emergency procurement may have been manufactured on paper.

THE OFFICIALS WHO RESIGNED, THE MINISTER WHO STAYED

Energy Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban, Kenya Pipeline Company Managing Director Joe Sang, and EPRA Director-General Daniel Kiptoo resigned on Saturday afternoon , April 4, 2026, within hours of their arrest.

Three of the most powerful men in Kenya’s petroleum regulatory architecture, gone in a single afternoon, in what the senator characterises not as accountability but as an attempt to draw a line and protect those above them. “Not fake resignations while in police custody,” Ole Kina said. “No theatrics. Just dockets, trials, and convictions.”

Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi rejected demands for his resignation regarding the Sh4.8 billion substandard fuel importation scandal, insisting that no legal or procedural grounds existed for him to vacate his office while investigations remain active.

Wandayi’s defence is architecturally precise: he says the consignment was processed at the technical level without his direct involvement, that his sign-off was never sought, and that when he learned of the problem on March 30, he briefed the President immediately.

That defence strains credibility on at least one documented point. The March 28 waiver letter from Trade CS Kinyanjui states Wandayi’s office was the primary addressee, not merely copied.

His PS, Mohammed Liban, signed the request to KEBS for waivers on carcinogenic parameters, namely benzene, manganese and sulphur, and copied Wandayi.

A Cabinet Secretary who was copied on a letter seeking a waiver for carcinogenic fuel parameters, and who claims he had no knowledge of the arrangement, is asking the public to believe in a ministry that runs itself without its minister.

Critics have noted the emerging pattern in Wandayi’s public statements, where a minister who initially defended his ministry is now positioning himself as the person exposing the rot in a sector he is supposed to be running. In Kenya’s political theatre, that moment often comes when pressure is mounting, investigations are closing in, and the public mood has already shifted.

Former Cabinet Secretary Martha Karua has been blunt about the political responsibility question: “There is no way something of that magnitude happens under his watch and he doesn’t know.”

A petition has been filed at the Milimani High Court seeking Wandayi’s suspension over alleged involvement in the irregular deal, while civil society movement Mtetezi is pursuing further public interest litigation aimed at compelling transparency in fuel pricing and procurement processes.

THE PRICE KENYANS ARE PAYING

CS Wandayi confirmed that a G2G-compliant consignment would have cost Sh8.4 billion, as against One Petroleum’s cargo which would, if factored into the monthly pump price computation, have resulted in an approximate rise of Sh14 per litre.

On a country where millions of Kenyans rely on fuel-dependent transport for every trip to work, hospital, and school, Sh14 per litre is not an abstraction. It is the difference between eating and not eating.

The government has instructed that the One Petroleum consignment’s costs not be factored into the April pricing cycle.

But the government has acknowledged that pump prices are likely to come under pressure from mid-April , which is precisely where we now stand.

Fuel prices in Nairobi have climbed to Sh206.70 per litre for petrol and Sh206.84 per litre for diesel , levels that will continue to distress an economy already buckling under sovereign debt and reduced disposable incomes.

Meanwhile, the DCI probe has expanded far beyond its original three targets. Detectives are now closing in on more than twenty suspects linked to the controversial fuel consignment, with company ownership structures tied to the consignment under investigation, including the offshore dimension represented by Mbaraki Holdings Limited in Mauritius.

The question investigators and financial crime analysts are now asking is not just who let the dirty fuel in, but who stood to gain. 

The question Senator Ole Kina is asking is simpler, and harder. He is asking the President to answer it directly, publicly, and with the force of criminal prosecution behind the answer. In his formulation, there is no room for the usual Kenyan accommodation, the resignation-in-lieu-of-prosecution, the strategic delay, the committee that investigates until the public forgets.

The senator has named names. He has read the emails. He has done the arithmetic on the price differential. What remains is the oldest and most difficult question in Kenyan public life: will those with the power to act use it?

“Kenyans need to see real charges filed in court against all those energy officials and others involved,” Ole Kina said. “Not fake resignations while in police custody. No theatrics. Just dockets, trials, and convictions.”

The MT Paloma has long since sailed south, passing Mozambique on its way to Port Elizabeth.

The fuel it left behind, some of it consumed over the Easter weekend, is already in the engines of Kenya’s vehicles, doing whatever damage elevated benzene and manganese do to machines and to human lungs over time.

The scandal it left behind is still very much alive, and its full anatomy has not yet been exposed.

What is clear is that three families benefited from this arrangement: the Jaffer family at Mbaraki Bulk Terminal, the officials who enabled the procurement, and the Oryx Energies network that was moving an identical cargo through an identical arrangement.

What is also clear is that Kenya’s National Security Advisory structure was used, wittingly or unwittingly, to create the bureaucratic space in which an emergency could be declared, a tender waived, and a billion-shilling cargo waved through on a three-day timeline that defies any innocent explanation.

The cabal, if that is what it is, did not improvise. It prepared. And it was very nearly successful.