A Farm in Kenya’s Rift Valley Ignites a National Reckoning With Israeli Investment

SOLAI, Kenya — On a clifftop above the sunken floor of the Great Rift Valley, where rosemary grows in military rows across 520 acres of irrigated earth, Erez Rivkin stands at the center of Kenya’s most combustible land controversy in years.

The Israeli investor has spent 15 years building what he calls a dream: export greenhouses, packhouses, a quarry, and now a master-planned residential retreat where buyers can purchase a “freehold” cliffside plot, holiday in the valley, and plug into his farming value chain for income.

Rivkin grows more than 22 crops — rosemary bound for Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, and Dubai among them. “Everything is already done, export is handled, and water is here,” he said of the farm where he has worked for 15 years. 

Within days of journalist Alex Chamwada’s promotional documentary tour going viral, hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were not admiring the drip irrigation. They were asking whether they were watching the beginning of a settlement.

The Spark

Chamwada — a decorated journalist and CEO of Chams Media whose Daring Abroad program on Citizen TV spotlights bold investment stories — posted videos and photos from the site in mid-February 2026, framing Rivkin as an exemplary foreign entrepreneur. The teaser for a full documentary drew enormous traffic. Then it drew fury.

Online critics described the project as a kibbutz-style settlement, invoking memories of communal farms in Israel.
Others invoked the 1903 “Uganda Scheme” — in fact proposed for what is now Kenya’s Uasin Gishu plateau — in which British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered land to Zionist leader Theodor Herzl as a Jewish refuge from European pogroms.

The Zionist Congress debated and ultimately rejected the offer in 1905, choosing Palestine instead. For many Kenyans online, the century-old episode wasn’t ancient history. It was a warning.

PHOTO | COURTESY Israeli investor Erez Rivkin, with media personality Alex Chamwada, at his real estate firm in Solai, Nakuru County.

“Is a Zionist settlement in East Africa back on the table?” asked one widely shared Instagram reel. Influencer Mumbi Seraki posted: “A new State of Israel in Kenya? Why are guys shocked? Don’t you remember Netanyahu is the one who showed up and saved Uhuru Kenyatta after a clear Raila win?”

No credible evidence has emerged to support claims of any government conspiracy, and Rivkin’s project appears to be private in nature. But the speed and intensity of the backlash revealed something more durable: the accumulated weight of Kenya’s unresolved land politics, its deepening entanglement with Israeli geopolitical ambition, and a global reckoning with Israeli expansion that the war in Gaza has made impossible to ignore.

The Shadow of Solai

The land sits in a region still haunted by disaster. On May 9, 2018, the Patel Milmet Dam burst amid heavy rains, killing at least 48 people.

It was one of five earthen embankment dams belonging to Mansukul Patel on the private property of his 1,400-hectare commercial rose farm and business, Solai Roses.

Kenya’s Water Resources Management Authority concluded that none of the dams on the property were properly licensed and were therefore illegal. 

Families of the 48 people who perished finally received compensation only after agreeing to an out-of-court deal — five years later, in 2023 — with payments of KSh 1.2 million per adult life and KSh 800,000 per child.

For a community that watched its villages swept away and then waited half a decade for accountability from a corporate farm, the arrival of another large foreign-owned agricultural operation a short distance from the same flood plain was never going to be received quietly.

Social media posts, unverified but widely shared, alleged that Rivkin’s land acquisition was connected to the tragedy and to undisclosed dealings with senior Kenyan politicians.

No evidence has been produced to substantiate these specific claims. What they reflect is something harder to dismiss: a community’s earned distrust of powerful investors operating on land where accountability has historically been absent.

The Legal Tangle

Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, under Article 65, explicitly prohibits non-citizens from owning freehold land. Foreign nationals are limited to leasehold tenure of up to 99 years, and any purported freehold interest held by a foreigner is automatically converted to such a lease. Companies with foreign shareholders are treated similarly.

The Great Rift Valley Retreat’s marketing materials — promoting “freehold master-planned” cliffside plots beginning at roughly KSh 1.9 million — have not publicly disclosed the corporate structure or title arrangements behind the development.

That silence has fed speculation.

Defenders of the project insist it complies with Kenyan law and creates local employment; the project’s official website, operating under the entity “New Agrodeal Farm,” continues to promote investment openly. As of February 17, 2026, neither the National Land Commission, Nakuru County, nor the national government had issued any statement addressing the project’s land titles or the public uproar.

Israel’s African Footprint — and Its Failures

The Solai controversy did not emerge in a vacuum. It landed in a Kenya whose relationship with Israeli investment is, to put it generously, complicated.

On July 5, 2016, Benjamin Netanyahu kick-started Israel’s scramble for Africa with a historic visit to Kenya, making him the first Israeli prime minister to visit Africa in 50 years.

The trip was laden with strategic candor. Netanyahu was explicit with Israeli ambassadors stationed across the continent: “The first interest is to dramatically change the situation regarding African votes at the UN and other international bodies from opposition to support. There are 54 countries in Africa; we want to erode the opposition and change it to support.”  Netanyahu stated that Israel’s goal was to use “trade, technology and investments” to entice African states to vote in favor of Israel at the United Nations and other international organizations. 

Between 2015 and 2023, the UNGA passed 154 resolutions against Israel, compared with 71 against all other countries combined.  The diplomatic stakes could not have been higher.

Kenya became the continent’s most important pivot point.

The flagship expression of that strategy was the Galana-Kulalu Food Security Project — an Israeli firm, Green Arava, contracted to develop a model farm on 10,000 acres at the Galana-Kulalu irrigation scheme, meant to be a precursor to expanding production on one million acres.

The contract was single-sourced, meaning that Kenyans did not carry out competitive bidding.

By the time Arava threw in the towel, the State had already paid the contractor Sh5.9 billion out of the Sh6.35 billion loan from Israel’s Bank Leumi.

Green Arava managed to cultivate only 500 acres before the National Irrigation Authority terminated the contract, citing slow implementation and inflated costs.  President Ruto later admitted the project was “a scam.”

Undeterred, Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Minister Musalia Mudavadi was by August 2024 announcing a new 25-year land lease arrangement with Israeli agricultural investors for wheat production, described as “a private-private arrangement which will only be guaranteed by the two governments through giving necessary logistics and a conducive environment.”   The same logic, the same sector, the same country.

A Geopolitics of Soil

Israel’s ambitions in East Africa have expanded even as its global image has contracted since October 2023. After it began its war on Gaza, whatever fragile support Israel had on the continent largely collapsed. South Africa accused Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice in December 2023. The African Union was unequivocal in its condemnation.

Yet Israel has pressed forward. In December 2025, Israel became the first country to recognize the Republic of Somaliland as an independent state, with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar signing the declaration.

Channel 12 in Israel reported that ties between the two governments emerged partly as Israel searched for countries willing to take in Gazans it was looking to move out of the Strip during the war.

The African Union Commission Chairperson warned that the recognition risks creating a “dangerous precedent with far-reaching implications for peace and stability across the continent.” 

The aid-as-leverage dynamic has a documented precedent.

When Senegal co-sponsored a 2016 UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Netanyahu recalled Israel’s ambassador to Dakar and cancelled Mashav drip-irrigation projects in the country — projects that had been “widely promoted as a major part of Israel’s contribution to the ‘fight against poverty in Africa.’” Israel has particularly set eyes on East Africa, especially Ethiopia, home to 160,000 Ethiopian Jews.

The Israeli aid agency Mashav sent aid worth $45.5 million to Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Kenya between 2009 and 2021, according to OECD data. Aid often went towards agriculture, water, and healthcare.

Kenyans who have watched this history unfold are not being paranoid in asking what is transactional and what is development.

Against this backdrop, Nakuru County’s simultaneous pursuit of Israeli partnerships in agri-tech, water management, and training — confirmed in county statements involving Israeli Ambassador Gideon Behar — reads differently than it might have five years ago.

For Kenyans watching a viral video of a thriving Israeli-owned farm on a valley clifftop, the context is not abstract. It is immediate.

The Divide

Kenya has worked with Israeli agricultural experts for decades, particularly in drip irrigation and greenhouse technology.

Supporters argue this is simply foreign investment meeting local opportunity, bringing jobs, skills, and higher yields. Both positions contain some truth. And that is precisely the problem.

Rivkin’s operation appears genuinely productive. His 15-year presence in Kenya suggests real commitment to the land, not extraction and exit. These are not nothing.

But Kenya’s land is never merely agronomic. It is biographical. Colonial dispossessions, post-independence resettlement conflicts, elite land captures, and post-election violence have made every large foreign-owned estate a political object, regardless of what grows on it.

The proposal to establish youth exchange programs between Kenyan and Israeli teenagers at the site — and Rivkin’s mention of possibly relocating an Israeli school to Solai — amplified rather than allayed the concerns of critics who see the project’s horizon extending far beyond rosemary exports.

Neither Rivkin nor his representatives have publicly clarified these proposals in the context of the controversy.

Chamwada, whose journalism has long celebrated entrepreneurial ambition, has not publicly addressed the backlash. His framing of Rivkin’s venture as an inspiring investment story collided with a public not, right now, inclined to admire Israeli ambition on African soil without harder questions.

Whether the collision was foreseeable, and whose responsibility it was to anticipate it, is a question for Kenyan journalism to answer.

What Remains Unanswered

The Great Rift Valley Retreat’s corporate ownership structure and title arrangements have not been made public.

The National Land Commission has not addressed whether a non-citizen can legally be the ultimate beneficiary of a “freehold” residential development. Nakuru County has not explained what due diligence it conducted alongside its Israeli partnership engagements.

Rivkin has not answered the question his own marketing raised.

What Kenya has, as of this writing, is a 520-acre farm at the epicenter of two unresolved national conversations: who controls the land, and what obligations come with being allied to a country the world is watching with unprecedented scrutiny.

Those conversations will outlast this news cycle. The valley is patient. The questions are not.