Banda Homes Is Being Wound Up. For Andrew Kamau Muhiu, It’s Chapter Four.

The liquidator has the keys now. Insolvency practitioner Waithaka Ngaruiya was appointed to wind up Banda Homes Limited effective 2 July 2026, according to a notice in the Kenya Gazette, formalising in law what hundreds of buyers had already concluded from their empty bank accounts and unfinished plots.

The appointment, made under Section 439(1) of the Insolvency Act and flowing from Insolvency Petition No. E44 of 2021, hands control of the company’s affairs, business and property to the liquidator.

Creditors have 60 days from the notice to lodge proof-of-debt forms through the Business Registration Service. Every enquiry now runs through Waithaka and Associates Advocates in Nairobi.

It has taken five years to get here. Susan Obuya, a Kenyan accountant based in the Netherlands, filed the original insolvency petition in May 2021 after Banda Homes failed to deliver the maisonette she had contracted for at the company’s Red Oak Estate project in Thika, or refund the Sh5.9 million she had paid.

The 15-month construction deadline in her 2019 agreement should have put her in the house by mid-2020.

Instead the contractor was ordered off site that year, and Obuya’s demand letters went nowhere. In March 2025, the High Court agreed there was no legal requirement to treat liquidation as a last resort, and found that Banda Homes could not pay its debts. It took a further sixteen months for a liquidator to be formally gazetted and take control.

THE LIQUIDATION, BY THE NUMBERS

Andrew Kamau Muhiu sat at the centre of it as director. His public story once ran the classic Kenyan rags-to-riches arc: land subdivision in Makongeni, Thika, small builds near Kenyatta University, then rapid scaling into a real-estate brand fronted by glossy advertising and lifestyle imagery.

He was reported at one point claiming monthly earnings of Sh20–25 million from real estate at the height of the Banda push.

When delivery collapsed, Covid-19 became the convenient explanation even though complaints about stalled sites and undelivered units predated the pandemic by at least a year, and Banda Homes was already being investigated by Kiambu County officials for non-delivery in February 2020.

A Company That Has Failed Before, Under Other Names

Banda Homes was never the first vehicle. It was, by multiple independent accounts, the fourth or fifth. Muhiu’s real-estate career runs through a chain of limited companies stretching back more than a decade: Mashariki Developers, then Dinara Developers around 2011, then Lettas Developers around 2013, then Banda Homes from roughly 2018.

Each iteration followed the same script aggressive off-plan sales collected against renders and site visits, construction that stalled or never started, and a rebrand once the previous name became too toxic to sell under.

The corporate genealogy, reconstructed from court filings and reporting that has tracked the company’s various offshoots, reads like a map of Kenya’s off-plan housing wreckage. Mashariki Developers, founded with Patrick Muchoki, Paul Nderitu and Martin Mwangi, had a single Kiambu project before folding.

Muhiu then teamed up with Muchoki, Joseph Ruhiu and Nderitu to form Lettas Developers, which collapsed almost as quickly its former directors scattering to found Mahiga Homes and Nyumbani Concepts Ltd. Muhiu’s own chief accountant at Lettas and later Banda Homes, George Mburu, went on to found Mizizi Africa Homes.

A former Lettas salesman, Ejidio Kinyajui, launched Willstone Homes. When Banda Homes itself began shedding directors, sales manager Martin Njoroge and colleague Milka Wambui spun off Miliki Space Ltd, while another departing director, Caroline Loontubu, started Petmall Shelters.

“Banda Homes directors and co-founders ruined a noble idea… Most of them passed through Banda Homes and other companies we founded.” — Andrew Kamau, blaming former partners for the collapse, while declining to explain where the deposits went.

Kamau has told at least one newspaper that he considers himself insolvent and blames former co-founders and directors for sabotaging the business by setting up competing projects next door to his own developments in Juja.

Kenya Insights could not independently verify his claims about sabotage, and his former partners have publicly rejected any responsibility for the company’s collapse.

What is not in dispute is the pattern: a new limited company forms, collects money from buyers desperate for a foothold in the property market, construction stalls, lawsuits mount, and the entity is eventually allowed to die while the man at the centre of it moves to the next letterhead.

Ruiru: The Court Case That Already Proved the Pattern

Banda Homes is not the only judgment hanging over Muhiu. In May 2025, Justice Aleem Visram of the High Court ordered Dinara Developers Limited and Muhiu personally to refund Sh19,875,000 to fourteen homebuyers who had paid deposits more than six years earlier for residential units on land in Ruiru Ruiru/Ruiru East Block 2/4779.

The houses were never built.

The ruling turned on a settlement agreement Muhiu had personally signed with the purchasers in September 2023, in which he acknowledged the debt in his personal capacity and undertook to repay it within 120 days.

The deadline passed without a shilling being returned, forcing the buyers back to court.

When Muhiu later argued he was no longer a Dinara director and that the company had indemnified him personally, Justice Visram was unsparing, finding that his defence raised no triable issue worth a full trial.

It is one of the very few instances in Muhiu’s documented history where a personal undertaking pierced the corporate veil he has otherwise relied on for more than a decade.

The Ruiru case matters precisely because it shows the mechanism in miniature: collect deposits, fail to build, sign a settlement to buy time, then contest liability once the deadline arrives and the money still has not moved.

The Family Behind the Name

Public court and news records also connect Muhiu to the Magu family tragedy that shocked Kenya in November 2014.

City lawyer Paul Magu Muhiu killed his wife, Lydia, and their three young children in Nairobi’s Muthaiga Pipeline estate before dying himself along the Thika–Garissa highway, in a case police and prosecutors linked to a cult led by preacher Ann Wanyoro, who was later charged in connection with the deaths.

Contemporaneous news reporting from the time identifies Andrew Muhiu as the uncle of the murdered children placing him as a close relative of Paul Magu.

The two matters are legally and factually separate, and nothing in the public record ties Andrew Kamau Muhiu to the killings.

It is included here only because it has surfaced repeatedly in reporting on his background, and because readers researching the Banda Homes collapse are entitled to the same public record that has circulated for years.

The Sh1.5 Billion Equity Bank Question

Muhiu’s name has also surfaced, at a remove, in one of the biggest bank fraud investigations in Kenyan history. Ruth Muthoni Kamau, identified by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations’ Banking Fraud Investigation Unit as a central figure in the Sh1.5 billion siphoned from Equity Bank’s salary suspense ledger in 2024, has stated in sworn affidavits that her entanglement in the probe stems partly from her connection to her former husband, Andrew Kamau Muhiu, and from links investigators drew between him and other suspects in the case.

Of the Sh1,545,553,374.59 moved out of the bank’s Britam Towers headquarters over 47 transactions, correspondence reviewed by reporters alleges Muthoni personally received more than Sh800 million, including sums routed through companies she controls.

Muhiu himself has not been charged in the Equity Bank matter, and the connection to that case remains one of marital history and investigative cross-reference rather than established culpability.

But the overlap places him, however peripherally, inside the same network of high-value financial scandals now under scrutiny in Nairobi a coincidence that has not escaped the buyers still chasing their Banda Homes deposits.

What the Liquidator Can Actually Recover

Section 444 of the Insolvency Act gives Waithaka Ngaruiya the power to take possession of any property Banda Homes is or appears entitled to, and to establish the company’s true assets and liabilities before distributing whatever remains according to statutory priority.

History offers thin comfort. Successive Muhiu-linked entities Mashariki, Dinara, Lettas left little behind for unsecured creditors when they folded, and the pattern of directors and money moving on to new corporate shells before the old one is formally wound up makes recovery for ordinary homebuyers unlikely to be more than symbolic.

Many Banda Homes buyers, interviewed over the years by local outlets, say they have already written off their deposits mentally, even as they continue paying rent and servicing bank loans taken out to fund houses that were never built.

Others are still fighting individual refund claims years after their original agreements lapsed. The Gazette notice gives them a 60-day window to formally register as creditors. It does not tell them how much, if anything, they will ever see back.

The Question That Won’t Close With the Liquidation

Muhiu’s public profile and past statements still describe him as an experienced real-estate executive with a demonstrated track record in the industry.

The court record the Ruiru judgment against him personally, the unpaid Banda Homes deposits now approaching Sh4 billion, the string of predecessor companies that collapsed under him and his known partners, and his tangential presence in Kenya’s largest recent bank fraud probe tells a considerably colder story.

Banda Homes’ liquidation is not an isolated business failure. It is the latest and largest chapter in a pattern that, on the documentary record built up through Mashariki, Dinara, Lettas and Banda, has repeated itself roughly once every few years for well over a decade.

The liquidator’s appointment formally closes Banda Homes. Whether it closes anything for Andrew Kamau Muhiu or simply clears the way for the next letterhead is the question the record so far leaves open.