The Geothermal Development Company has perfected a business model unavailable to any private company on earth: acquire the most expensive machinery money can buy, let it rot in the open, and hand the bill to a taxpayer who will never see a single megawatt for it.

The Auditor-General’s report for the year ended June 2025 has now confirmed, in the driest bureaucratic language possible, what Kenya Insights can now put in the only language that fits: this is not mismanagement. This is a scam that has run for a decade, survived four changes of chief executive, and continues to run today under the noses of a board that keeps issuing statements instead of answers.

At the centre of it sit seven drilling rigs, machines GDC itself markets as capable of piercing seven kilometres into the earth and boasts are “some of the most powerful in Africa.” They cost Kenyans Sh15.93 billion to acquire. Three of them have not turned a single metre of earth in five straight years.

The Auditor-General’s verdict was blunt: value for money on the entire Sh15.93 billion fleet “could not be confirmed.” Not delayed. Not pending. Could not be confirmed the closest thing a state auditor will ever say to “the money is gone.”

A DECADE OF THE SAME LIE

GDC management’s explanation for the idle rigs vandalism of cables, missing parts, no budget, no staff is not new. It is the same excuse the company gave regulators in the 2021/2022 financial year, when the Auditor-General flagged four of the same rigs, worth a combined Sh8.96 billion, as unused after cables, batteries and electronic components were stripped from the machines between December 2017 and January 2020.

That is a two-year window in which thieves apparently walked in and out of a state corporation’s flagship assets undetected, or unbothered, while the company that owned them filed no insurance claim because it had no insurance policy.

It gets worse. GDC’s own failure to honour its security contract during that vandalism episode triggered arbitration at the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, Nairobi branch, which ordered the company to pay Sh50,027,187 to the very security firm whose job was to stop the theft Sh46.5 million in unpaid claims plus arbitration costs after auditors found GDC had breached its own contractual obligations. Kenyans, in other words, were made to pay twice: once for rigs that were stripped bare, and again to compensate the guards for a contract GDC itself violated.

THE PROCUREMENT TRAIL EACC WOULD RATHER FORGET

GDC’s drilling equipment has been a procurement crime scene before, and the file is still open. In 2015, the Director of Public Prosecutions approved criminal charges against then Managing Director Dr Silas Simiyu, the entire GDC Tender Committee and General Manager of Drilling Services Michael Mbevi over the irregular procurement of rig-move services from Bonfide Clearing and Forwarding Limited.

The numbers explain the anger: GDC paid Bonfide Sh19.55 million per rig move in the 2010/2011 financial year, then went back to the same firm in 2012/2013 and paid Sh42.746 million per rig move for the identical service an increase of more than 100 percent with no credible justification on file.

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission recommended the officials be surcharged and prosecuted.

The case, styled ACC No. 2015 Republic vs Nicholas Karume and 7 others, has dragged through the courts for close to a decade with a judge only recently ruling that it must continue. Simiyu resigned in March 2015 after being adversely mentioned in the affair. Nobody has gone to prison.

This is the institutional culture the seven rigs were bought into and the culture that has been allowed to manage them since: a procurement department with a demonstrated, prosecutable history of paying inflated sums to favoured contractors for equipment and services central to the drilling programme, followed by years of those same assets sitting idle, unguarded and uninsured.

TWELVE TRUCKS, EIGHT GHOSTS

The rot is not confined to the rigs. GDC bought twelve bulk cementing trucks in 2016 at a cost of Sh138.9 million essential support equipment for well drilling, without which cementing operations on any functioning rig would struggle to proceed.

Eight of the twelve, exactly two-thirds of the fleet, have never been used since the day they were delivered and remain non-functional. GDC has offered no public explanation for why two-thirds of a support fleet bought specifically to service its drilling programme has never turned a wheel. If the rigs were idle, why did the company keep the trucks meant to support them running at all and if they weren’t idle, why are eight of twelve trucks still untouched nearly a decade later?

THE Sh344.5 MILLION SOFTWARE THAT DOES NOT EXIST

Perhaps the most damning single line in the entire 2025 audit concerns a drilling monitoring software system GDC contracted in 2014, at a total cost of Sh344.5 million, to provide real-time fleet management and CCTV integration across the rig fleet the very oversight tool that might have caught the vandalism, the idle machines and the missing trucks years earlier.

GDC advanced the contractor Sh137.8 million.

When auditors went to verify the system in September 2025, eleven years after the contract was signed, the software had still not been installed. Management told auditors that the first milestone, covering fleet management, had been achieved. Auditors asked for evidence. None was produced.

GDC’s own response was to disclose that the matter is under investigation by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission and then to admit that the company has not received a single progress update from investigators on a case involving its own money.

A state corporation that cannot get an update on an EACC file concerning Sh137.8 million of its own advance payment is either not asking hard enough, or already knows the answer it would get. The Auditor-General’s conclusion stands unchallenged: value for money on the Sh137.8 million paid out “could not be ascertained.”

LOSSES WIDEN WHILE THE FLEET ROTS

While three Sh15.93-billion rigs gather dust, eight cementing trucks sit unused and a Sh344.5-million software system remains a decade-long ghost, GDC’s own financial performance is deteriorating in step. Pre-tax losses widened to Sh1.46 billion in the year to June 2025, up from Sh528.2 million the year before a near-threefold jump.

The company was rescued from reporting a net loss only by a Sh1.82 billion tax credit, without which the corporation created in 2008 to accelerate Kenya’s geothermal ambitions would have posted red ink on every line.

Strip away the accounting relief, and GDC is a company whose core drilling business is failing precisely where its billions were supposed to be working hardest.

WHO ANSWERS FOR THIS

GDC’s leadership has changed hands repeatedly since the rigs were bought and vandalised, and each new occupant of the corner office has inherited the same idle machines without visibly forcing a reckoning. Silas Simiyu resigned in 2015 under an EACC cloud that produced criminal charges but no convictions.

Johnson ole Nchoe presided over the company through the 2016 cementing-truck purchase and into the period when the rigs were being stripped of cables between late 2017 and early 2020.

Jared Othieno took over in 2020 as the vandalism-era rigs sat un repaired. Paul Ngugi, appointed in April 2023 on a three-year contract that has since lapsed, was Managing Director when the 2025 audit was conducted and when the software project was found not installed eleven years after it was contracted — the most consequential findings on his watch, on a fleet whose rot long predates him but which he did not fix either.

Today the company is run by Acting Managing Director and CEO Stephen Busieney, GDC’s own General Manager for Finance and Investment, who is now the officer simultaneously overseeing the books that record the widening losses and the acting leadership answerable for the idle billions sitting on those same books.

Board Chairman Hon. Walter Osebe Nyambati has led the board throughout this period of compounding audit queries. GDC is currently recruiting a substantive Managing Director and CEO, a process that gives the board a rare, clean opportunity to explain publicly, on the record why Sh15.93 billion in rigs, Sh138.9 million in trucks and Sh344.5 million in software have produced nothing but audit paragraphs for over a decade.

The Auditor-General has already delivered her verdict: value for money cannot be confirmed.

What remains is the question this newspaper puts squarely to Kawi House to Nyambati’s board, to Busieney’s acting management and to whoever inherits the substantive chair next: who signed off on machines nobody insured, who let a monitoring system nobody built run for eleven years, and who, if anyone, will finally be surcharged for turning Sh16 billion of Kenyan public money into a ghost fleet that generates nothing but excuses.