Murkomen, Sudi and MP Fingered In Sh20 Billion Runda Land Grab

The land along Kiambu Road that cradles Paradise Lost, one of Nairobi’s most recognisable recreational destinations, has always attracted covetous eyes. But a petition filed at the Kiambu High Court this week has put names to those eyes, and they are among the most powerful in the Ruto administration.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, Kapseret Member of Parliament Oscar Sudi and his Gatundu North counterpart Elijah Kururia have been hauled before the court by Daniel Mwangi Mbugua and his daughter Wanjiru Mwangi, who want the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate the three for allegedly facilitating the invasion and seizure of the 300-acre Kasarini Coffee Farm, registered under land reference numbers 5974/1, 5972 and 5971. The property, which sits in one of the most premium land corridors in the greater Nairobi area, is conservatively valued at Sh20 billion in court papers.

The petition lands at a peculiar moment for Murkomen. Less than a week before being named in a court filing over an alleged armed land grab, the Cabinet Secretary appeared before a National Assembly committee to denounce, with characteristic confidence, the very nexus of land grabbers and criminal gangs that petitioners accuse him of commanding.

“CS Murkomen was patrolling with a team of six vehicles and a truck with 20 armed goons, wielding machetes and other crude weapons,” Ms Wanjiru Mwangi states in court documents.

A Billionaire’s Estate, A Bitter Inheritance

To understand the full dimensions of the battle now raging in the courts, one must first understand the man whose estate lies at the centre of it. The late Moses Mbugua Mwangi was among the most reclusive of Kiambu’s self-made billionaires, a man whose wealth was built through decades of enterprise conducted largely away from public gaze. He died in 2008, leaving behind an estate of staggering proportions accumulated through his vehicle Ndunde Investments, which he incorporated in 1986 and placed under the joint stewardship of his wife Christine Mithiri and their three sons: Daniel Mwangi, Isaac Gichia and Joseph Mbai Mbugua.

The Ndunde portfolio was not modest. It included Misahara Coffee Estate and the Kasarini Coffee Farm in Kiambu, the Suguror Ranch in Laikipia County, and prime properties in Kangemi, Runda, Ruiru and Karen. It is on the Kasarini Coffee Farm that Paradise Lost, the sprawling recreational facility that generations of Nairobians have visited, is situated. The resort generates an estimated Sh50 million annually, according to affidavits filed by Daniel Mbugua in the long-running succession dispute that has seen the three brothers fighting in the courts of Milimani for years.

That fraternal war is now being weaponised against them. Daniel Mbugua, the petitioner before the Kiambu court, accuses his own brothers of working with the alleged land grabbers to disinherit him and his daughter. He has listed Isaac Gichia and Joseph Mbai as interested parties to the suit. Yet in a twist that complicates any clean narrative of villains and victims, Isaac Gichia has also publicly claimed to be a victim of the same land grab, telling reporters he was shocked when he learnt that a company called Pamat Enterprises had already obtained title deeds to significant portions of the contested land. The family feud has, in effect, created the opening through which outsiders have marched in.

Pamat Enterprises: The Corporate Vehicle at the Heart of the Grab

Business Registration Service documents seen by media reveal that Pamat Enterprises Limited was incorporated in 1984 and operates from Lavington in Nairobi County. Its directors and shareholders are listed as Philip Mulwa Nzioka, Isaya Begi Gesicho, Black Scorpion International Services Limited, ICPHER Consultants Co Ltd and Dawn Innovations. How a Lavington-based company incorporated four decades ago came to hold title deeds to land that the Mbugua family says has never been alienated to any external party is at the core of the petition.

Kururia, the Gatundu North MP, has offered the most detailed public response of the three named politicians. He told reporters that Kasarini Coffee Farm workers were allocated land by the government in the early 1980s, and that Pamat Enterprises was part of that historical allocation. He asserted that the contested parcels, which he identified by LR numbers 5970 and 5969, belong to the community of former farmworkers, and not to the feuding brothers. The petitioners contest this version entirely.

Murkomen and Sudi did not respond to calls and text messages sent to their phones ahead of the story’s publication. Their silence is conspicuous given the gravity of the allegations: the petition asks the court to order the Director of Criminal Investigations and the Officer Commanding Police Station as well as the OCPD of Kiambu to produce title deeds allegedly presented to police for authentication by the alleged invaders, and to explain how the authenticity of those documents was determined.

A CS Who Wages War on Land Grabbers, Allegedly While Conducting One

The irony of Murkomen’s situation is difficult to overstate. On April 21, just one day before this petition came to public light, the Cabinet Secretary for Interior was before the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Administration and Internal Security, delivering a sweeping account of criminal gangs and political violence. He told lawmakers that some land grabbers were working with criminal gangs to frustrate court-ordered evictions. He said that organised criminal groups were operating in well over one hundred identifiable formations across Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa and outlying counties. He warned, with the authority of the state’s chief security officer, that any leader financing such groups would be investigated.

Within twenty-four hours, he was the subject of a court petition alleging precisely the conduct he had just publicly condemned. According to affidavits filed by Wanjiru Mwangi, on the 11th of April 2026, she received a phone call reporting that Murkomen was on the contested Kasarini land, leading a convoy of six vehicles and a truck carrying twenty armed individuals. She says the men brandished machetes. Two days later, on April 13, she claims she was nearly attacked by the very individuals who had taken control of the farm.

The petitioners allege that police have illegally occupied the family land without any court order, and that Kiambu Police Station, under its commanding officer, has been compromised.

The petition asks the Inspector General of Police and the Internal Affairs Director to explain why the alleged invaders appear to have a comfortable working relationship with officers at Kiambu Police Station. The family says that despite recording statements, police have been unresponsive. They have asked the court for an order compelling the production of the title deeds the alleged grabbers presented to officers for authentication. They have also warned the court of an imminent plot to murder the petitioners, a claim the court will need to assess carefully when the matter returns for mention on May 19.

Oscar Sudi: A Recurring Presence in Land Controversies

For Oscar Sudi, this is not his first encounter with land-related allegations. The flamboyant Kapseret MP, who grew up as a squatter’s son on the Moi University farm belt and built himself into one of the Rift Valley’s most polarising political figures, has been named in a series of land disputes stretching back years.

In 2020, the National Assembly’s Lands Committee summoned Sudi to appear before it over allegations that he was involved in a scheme to grab 1,515 acres of Moi University land in Kesses, Uasin Gishu County, to the detriment of squatters who had occupied the land for over four decades. Sudi refused to appear, posting a video from his social media platforms dismissing the matter and insisting the land belonged to the university. The committee’s chairperson, then-North Mugirango MP Joash Nyamoko, confirmed that Sudi had been adversely mentioned during site visits and demanded that he present himself to answer for the allegations.

In a separate and earlier case, Sudi was accused of acquiring a 50-acre piece of land in Eldoret from a widow named Eunice Talai under circumstances that members of the late Chief Talai’s family described as exploitative and irregular. A section of the family went to court arguing that Sudi had taken advantage of his proximity to the deceased patriarch to obtain land that rightfully belonged to the widow and her children. Sudi’s lawyers denied the claims and maintained he had followed due procedure in the acquisition.

In January of that same period, Sudi led a group of youths in demolishing structures on a contested 20-acre parcel in Kamagut, Uasin Gishu County, reportedly acting on instructions from above. The incident occurred despite an existing court order. It was, observers noted at the time, a brazen demonstration of how proximity to political power in Kenya can insulate actors from the ordinary consequences of defying judicial authority.

The Sudi-Murkomen Axis and a Recruitment of Their Names

The two men named in the Kasarini petition have a political history that goes deeper than a shared parliamentary benches. Murkomen has publicly described Sudi as part of the innermost circle around President William Ruto, a man through whom access to the presidency is brokered. In a Nairobi High Court case that emerged separately in March 2026, a former Kenya Revenue Authority senior manager, George Musembi Muia, accused a fraudster called Cosmas Mutati Nzoka of having extracted Sh63 million from him by dangling the names of Murkomen, Sudi, Felix Koskei, the Head of Public Service, and Farouk Kibet, the President’s personal assistant. Musembi says Mutati presented himself as a man with access to these power brokers, and that he paid millions for an introduction that would secure him a chairmanship at the Kenya Urban Roads Authority.

The case is instructive not because Murkomen or Sudi are defendants in it, but because it shows the market value their names command in Kenya’s political economy of access. Fraudsters invoke them because the public believes in their power. That same reputation for power is now being cited against them in a different kind of fraud, one played out not in brown envelopes at Muthaiga Square, but on three hundred acres of prime Kiambu farmland at the gates of Paradise Lost.

The Kasarini Land: A History Older Than All the Players

The land at the centre of this dispute carries a history that predates the current litigants by generations. Colonial settlers identified the Kasarini area along Kiambu Road as suitable for coffee farming research in the early twentieth century. In 1964, the Kasarini Farmers’ Co-operative Society was formally registered, bringing together families who had worked the land and whose relationship to it stretched back decades further. By 1974, disputes over control had begun to emerge, with settler-linked management moving to assert exclusive authority over the land and the coffee grown on it. Claims and counter-claims about the legitimate chain of title have wound through Kenya’s courts and, for a period, before the National Land Commission, ever since.

The wider Kasarini-Paradise Lost corridor has for years been among the most litigated patches of land in Kiambu County. A separate group, the Kasarini Ancestral Families’ Self-Help Group, has filed NLC claims asserting that their forebears were violently dispossessed of over nine hundred acres in the area, land that now hosts not only Paradise Lost but also Runda Paradise, Kencom Sacco Homes, Woodsman Villa, Prime Presidential Runda, Runda Palm Gardens, St Mary’s School, and several churches. The sheer volume and value of the developments that have gone up on contested land, estimated at over Sh100 billion in aggregate, speaks to how systematically the resolution of historical land questions has been evaded in favour of commercial exploitation.

Into this already volatile landscape, the petition filed this week drops three of the most politically significant names in the current administration. The High Court in Kiambu has directed the petitioners to serve all named parties and appear on May 19 for further directions. Whether the EACC investigation the petitioners have asked for will materialise, whether the DCI will explain the title deeds authenticated at Kiambu Police Station, and whether the named politicians will now be compelled to break their silence are questions that will define the coming weeks of this case.

One thing is already clear: Paradise Lost is misnamed. For the Mbugua family, paradise was not lost in a mythological fall from grace. It appears to have been taken, in broad daylight, by men in motorcades.