Court Brands Sh1.1 Billion Fee Demand by Lawyer Victor Swanya “Excessive and Exorbitant,” Exposes How City Hall Lets Public Money Bleed Through Legal Bills

The High Court has put into writing what ordinary Nairobi residents have long suspected but rarely seen confirmed in black and white: that the legal fees flowing out of City Hall are not just steep, they are often manufactured. In a ruling that has reopened uncomfortable questions about how Nairobi County spends public money on private lawyers, a judge of the Commercial and Tax Division described a Sh1.1 billion fee note presented by advocate Victor Ogeto Swanya as a figure “bound to raise eyebrows in any quarters,” before going on to suggest that the money fought over in court might have been better spent on medicines, roads and street lighting for the people of Nairobi.

Yet despite those blunt observations, the court still ordered the county to pay Swanya Sh311.3 million, plus interest, because Nairobi County’s own legal department had already signed a binding fee agreement and then failed to use the legal tools available to undo it. The result is a familiar one: a county that bled money through a process its own officials apparently knew was inflated, and a judiciary that, however uneasy, found itself bound to enforce a deal City Hall struck with its eyes open.

“A billion shillings fee note is bound to raise eyebrows in any quarters.” — the court, on Swanya’s initial Sh1.17 billion demand

The case traces back to a 2021 constitutional petition filed by the Communist Party of Kenya challenging the closure and rehabilitation of Uhuru Park under the Nairobi Metropolitan Services. It was, on its face, a public interest dispute about whether the county had followed environmental and public participation rules before fencing off one of the city’s most treasured public spaces. By the time the Environment and Land Court delivered judgment in March 2022, the matter had already produced a side drama of its own: a legal bill running into the billions for the lawyer the county brought in to defend the project.

FROM A PARK DISPUTE TO A BILLION-SHILLING INVOICE

Court records show Swanya initially presented a fee note of Sh1.17 billion for representing the county in the Uhuru Park matter. Within a day of the judgment being delivered, that figure was negotiated down to an all-inclusive Sh325.3 million, calculated against a subject matter value of Sh139 million, a number the county’s own legal department appears to have set. The then County Solicitor, Erick Odhiambo, wrote to Swanya confirming the figure had been verified under the Advocates Remuneration Order. Swanya accepted the same day. A memo was drawn up, a payment voucher for Sh90 million was processed, and the Controller of Budget approved withdrawal of Sh85 million from the County Revenue Fund.

Then, according to Swanya’s own account before the court, the approved money was diverted and used for something else entirely. Nairobi County did not dispute that a partial payment process had been initiated. What it has never explained, in this case or in the pattern of similar cases stretching back over a decade, is where that money actually went, and who signed off on redirecting public funds that had already been earmarked, audited and approved for a specific legal debt.

Two years later, in April 2024, the county abruptly reversed course and slashed the payable fee to Sh14 million, arguing the original figure was arrived at in error and that the underlying case was a constitutional petition, not a commercial dispute justifying a Sh139 million valuation. Swanya sued. The court sided with him, finding the fee agreement valid, never properly set aside, and binding on the county. It dismissed the argument that the County Attorney lacked authority to negotiate fees, noting tartly that the county had never identified which official, if not the County Attorney, was supposed to hold that authority.

THE PATTERN BEHIND THE HEADLINE

Strip away the specifics of the Uhuru Park case and what remains is a script Nairobi County has run before, with different lawyers, different cases, and the same outcome: enormous opening demands, court-supervised haircuts, and a county treasury left holding a bill that dwarfs what comparable legal work would cost almost anywhere else in the country.

The most instructive precedent is lawyer Donald Kipkorir’s decade-long pursuit of fees from City Hall over a single land case, the Embakasi Barracks dispute between the defunct city council and the Ministry of Defence. In 2022, a taxing master calculated his firm’s entitlement at Sh1.338 billion for a case involving a 3,000-acre parcel valued at Sh61.5 billion, a sum critics, including lawyer Waikwa Wanyoike, pointed out was nearly seven per cent of the county’s entire annual shareable revenue of Sh20 billion for one law firm’s work on one matter. Wanyoike publicly demanded Kipkorir share not just the judgment but the underlying pleadings and submissions to allow a proper value-for-money audit. The dispute dragged through 2024 and 2025, with the County government under Governor Johnson Sakaja resisting payment, the High Court at one point ordering Sh1.3 billion deposited into a joint account, and Sakaja’s administration later persuading the court to set that order aside and allow it to mount a defence.

“They wanted to approve all my payments if I give them 50% of the sums I am owed.” — Donald Kipkorir, describing an alleged bribe demand from County Assembly officials

It was in the middle of that fight that Kipkorir made the allegation that should have triggered far more scrutiny than it did. He claimed the Nairobi County Assembly Budget Committee, meeting in Naivasha alongside Governor Sakaja to prepare a supplementary budget, called him with an offer: his pending legal bills would be approved in full if he handed over fifty per cent of the sums owed to him. Kipkorir says he told the committee his fees were already calculated in line with the Advocates Remuneration Order and decreed by a court, and that he would not pay a single shilling in kickbacks. He went further, accusing the county of operating a system in which bills, invoices and court decrees are only released to claimants willing to surrender half the value to officials, and said he had reported the matter to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. Sakaja rejected the allegations and accused Kipkorir in turn of corruption, but neither the EACC complaint nor the underlying claim that a fifty per cent bribe economy operates inside City Hall’s payment system has ever been publicly resolved.

If true, and Kipkorir has never withdrawn the claim, the implication is damning. It would mean the inflated fee notes that make headlines, the billion-shilling demands that judges call eyebrow-raising, are not simply the product of aggressive lawyering. They may be the front end of a kickback architecture, where huge claims are deliberately allowed to balloon because a bigger bill creates a bigger pot for officials to skim from before release. A lawyer demanding fifty per cent less in fees has less room to be squeezed for a fifty per cent bribe. The incentive, perversely, runs toward inflation, not restraint.

NOT AN ISOLATED CASE

The Swanya and Kipkorir matters sit alongside a long list of similar disputes that have made Nairobi County the single largest source of legal fee litigation against any devolved government in Kenya. Senior Counsel Tom Ojienda has collected Sh264 million from the county for five 2014-era suits, after initially demanding Sh1.84 billion, a demand a court later cut down by roughly eighty-six per cent. He was previously paid Sh30 million for a matatu parking fee case he argued should have earned him closer to Sh286 million, and has gone on to extract further multimillion-shilling awards from the National Land Commission and Narok County using the same fee-litigation playbook.

Advocate Samson Masaba, trading as Munikah and Company Advocates, secured a Sh498.7 million payout in September 2025 for legal work performed in 2003 and 2006, two decades after the services were rendered, with the bill having climbed to as much as Sh800 million at an earlier stage of the dispute. An analysis of the county’s pending bills shows Nairobi is facing a Sh21.3 billion outstanding legal costs bill, of which Sh6.2 billion, a disproportionate 29 per cent, is owed to just four advocates. The Auditor-General found that 65 of 159 legal cases handled by the county had been assigned to just eight advocates, with no clear justification for how those firms were selected over others.

Sh21.3 billion in outstanding legal bills. Sh6.2 billion of it owed to just four advocates. Sixty-five of 159 cases handed to only eight lawyers, with no documented justification.

The scale of the problem has now reached Parliament’s own watchdogs. The Controller of Budget has flagged that Nairobi County alone accounted for Sh21.39 billion, or 73 per cent, of the cumulative legal costs reported across all 38 counties as of June 2024. A separate civil society petition filed this year is asking the High Court to bar counties and public institutions from hiring private advocates altogether for work their own salaried county attorneys are constitutionally mandated to handle, arguing there is no justification for routing public money to private firms when legal officers already sit on the public payroll. That same petition noted that lawyers representing the IEBC alone pocketed Sh445.5 million in fees following the disputed 2022 elections. The High Court has already issued temporary orders halting the practice pending full determination of the case, a signal that the judiciary itself is losing patience with a system it keeps being asked to adjudicate.

THE MECHANICS OF THE SQUEEZE

What makes the Swanya case so revealing is not the size of the final figure, Sh311 million is, by Nairobi standards, almost modest, but the mechanics it lays bare in granular detail. A subject matter value of Sh139 million was assigned to a public interest petition that, on a plain reading, sought no specific monetary award at all. That valuation, set internally by the county’s own solicitor rather than imposed by a court, became the multiplier from which a Sh325 million fee was calculated. The county that two years later called this figure “utterly excessive” and the product of “error” is the same county whose own legal department generated it, verified it, and began paying it before anyone raised an objection.

That is the part the court could not get past, and the part that should worry Nairobi ratepayers most. A County Solicitor with full authority to bind the government negotiated and signed off on the fee. The Controller of Budget approved a partial withdrawal of public funds against it. A payment voucher was processed. Only when a change of administration or a change of mood made the bill politically inconvenient did anyone in government suggest the number was wrong, and by then it was too late to undo a contract the county had already begun performing. Either the original valuation was incompetent, raising the question of who in the legal department signed off on an inflated subject matter figure and why, or it was deliberate, raising the much darker question Kipkorir has already put on record: that someone benefits when these bills balloon, and it is rarely the public.

The diversion of the approved Sh85 million, money Swanya says never reached him despite Controller of Budget sign-off, deserves scrutiny in its own right. Public funds withdrawn from the County Revenue Fund for a specific, audited legal debt and then redirected elsewhere without documentation is not a footnote to this story. It is, on the facts as presented in court and undisputed by the county, a parallel financial irregularity that no agency appears to have investigated independently of the fee dispute itself.

WHY THIS KEEPS HAPPENING

Lawyers who have watched the pattern repeat across Ojienda, Kipkorir, Masaba and now Swanya point to a structural weakness rather than a single rogue official. Nairobi County maintains a legal department with salaried county attorneys whose job is precisely to handle this kind of litigation. Yet the Auditor-General has repeatedly found cases routed to private advocates without competitive selection, without documented justification, and frequently without the kind of contemporaneous record-keeping that would let the public reconstruct, after the fact, why a particular firm was chosen and at what price. Each missing link in that chain is an opportunity for a number to be inflated somewhere between instruction and invoice, and for whoever controls the chain to extract value from the gap.

The county’s defence in the Swanya case, that it acted to protect prudent use of public finance once it realised the scale of the bill, will strike many Nairobi residents as too little, far too late. The court itself seemed to share that frustration, noting that the county mounted only “weak half-hearted attempts to resile from an agreement,” never called a witness to be cross-examined, and never filed a counterclaim seeking to be released from the very contract its own officials signed. A government serious about protecting public money does not wait two years and a change of political weather to discover that a bill it personally negotiated was excessive. It either negotiates honestly the first time, or it explains, under oath and in public, why it didn’t.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Sh311 million will now leave Nairobi’s coffers, on top of the hundreds of millions already paid out to Ojienda, Masaba, and the Sh1.3 billion still being fought over with Kipkorir. None of it required Nairobi residents to receive better roads, better hospitals, or better street lighting, the very public goods the court itself suggested the money might have served. What it required was a fee note inflated past any honest reading of the underlying case, a county legal department willing to sign off on it, and a system with so few internal checks that by the time anyone objected, the public was already on the hook. Until Nairobi County can explain who values these cases, who selects these lawyers, and where diverted approvals like the missing Sh85 million actually went, every new fee judgment will read less like a legal dispute and more like a receipt for money that left City Hall through the back door.