Investigations Reveal The Depth Of Rot In City Hall’s Garbage Collection Tender To Corrupt Ghanaian Firm

At 5.05 on the morning of Monday, February 16, 2026, a technical delegation from City Hall was scheduled to board a Kenya Airways flight at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, bound for Accra.

Their mission, conducted in conditions of unusual secrecy, was framed as a due diligence exercise: to inspect the facilities of Zoomlion Ghana Limited, a waste management company to which Nairobi County Government had, six days earlier, awarded a multibillion-shilling, twenty-year contract.

The chairman of the tender evaluation committee, Engineer Charles Ngugi Gathara, never made it onto that plane. He collapsed at the airport after suffering a sudden illness and was pronounced dead. His colleagues departed without him.

That a man died while preparing to perform due diligence on a deal that had already been awarded ought, under any functioning procurement regime, to have been the least of the questions raised by the City Hall-Zoomlion transaction.

It was not. The Zoomlion contract, formally designated Tender No. NCC/ENV/RFP/109/2025-2026, is now the subject of a High Court conservatory order, a damning internal technical review, a separate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry in Mombasa, and a chorus of civil society outrage that has drawn comparisons to Ghana’s own long experience of being looted by the very company Nairobi has now embraced.

Investigations by Kenya Insights, drawing on court filings, procurement documents, internal government communications, international debarment records and multiple sources within City Hall and the National Treasury, reveal a procurement so fundamentally compromised that it calls into question not merely the contract itself but the integrity of every institution that permitted it to proceed.

THE DEAL IN PLAIN TERMS

The contract grants Zoomlion Ghana Limited exclusive rights to design, construct, operate, maintain and eventually transfer an integrated solid waste management system for Nairobi City County.

The scope encompasses waste collection and haulage across the capital, control of the 76-acre Dandora dumpsite, sorting, recycling and disposal infrastructure, and the construction of a waste-to-energy facility that the national government has projected could generate electricity and produce fertiliser by 2027.

The tenure is twenty years, a period that will outlast at least three gubernatorial terms and bind administrations not yet elected to a contract whose full financial terms have not been made public.

The notification of award was issued in United States dollars, an irregularity that raised immediate concern among Treasury officials who reviewed the agreement.

No dedicated funding mechanism, no escrow arrangement, no defined management fee schedule, and no guaranteed minimum waste supply commitment appear in the contract as reviewed by City Hall’s own technical team.

That team characterised the document as providing Zoomlion with what amounted to a blank cheque drawn on the public of Nairobi.

“Several commercial and financial safeguards require strengthening. The absence of provisions addressing ISPO arrangements, escrow mechanisms, clearly defined management fee schedules, guaranteed minimum waste supply and dedicated funding sources may expose the project to operational and financial risks.” — City Hall Technical Review

Zoomlion Waste Services Limited, the Kenyan vehicle for the deal, was incorporated on August 23, 2025 with Zoomlion Ghana Limited listed as the sole shareholder and two Ghanaian nationals, Said Haidar and Joseph Kwame Siaw Agyepong, listed as directors.

A single Kenyan, Mombasa lawyer Heeral Vishal Soni, appears as a director without shares.

The incorporation of the local entity preceded the advertising of the tender by nearly four months, a sequence that procurement specialists say is consistent with a tender designed around a pre-selected beneficiary.

THE SOLE BIDDER PROBLEM

The tender was advertised on December 18, 2025, on the City Hall website and the Public Procurement Information Portal. Bids closed and were opened on January 8, 2026. Zoomlion Ghana Limited was the only entity to submit a response.

In a project of this scale, complexity and duration, involving the primary waste infrastructure of a capital city of more than six million people, a single bid is not a market outcome.

It is an administrative outcome: the product of deliberate choices about how a tender is structured, priced, timed and classified.

A senior official in the National Treasury reviewed the tender documents and told Kenya Insights that the procurement was misconceived from inception.

The project, by virtue of its financing, construction and long-term operational components, falls squarely within the Public Private Partnership Act 2021 and should have been processed through the PPP Directorate under the National Treasury.

Instead, it was run under the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act 2015, a choice that stripped it of the safeguards that apply to major infrastructure concessions.

The minimum advertising period for an open international tender is 21 days; without international classification the period can be compressed in ways that effectively exclude foreign competitors who might otherwise have entered the field.

The tender document contains a clause stating that the process is open to both local and international bidders.

However, the document bears none of the required classification initials that legally designate a tender as either Open National Tender or Open International Tender.

In the absence of those designations, Kenyan companies were nominally eligible while the structural conditions of the tender ensured that only a firm already positioned and incorporated in Kenya before the advertisement could realistically respond within the window available.

Zoomlion Waste Services Limited had been in existence for exactly that purpose since August.

A HISTORY OF BRIBERY, OVERBILLING AND SCANDAL

The company at the centre of this arrangement is not a newcomer to controversy. Zoomlion Ghana Limited and two subsidiaries, Accra Compost Plant and Zoom Alliance, were formally debarred by the World Bank in 2013 after an investigation found that the company had paid bribes to facilitate contract execution and invoice processing on the World Bank-financed Emergency Monrovia Urban Sanitation Project in Liberia.

The debarment barred Zoomlion and its affiliates from bidding on any World Bank-funded contracts worldwide.

The sanction remained in force until 2015, when the company entered into a Negotiated Resolution Agreement with the Bank, acknowledged the misconduct and agreed to strengthen compliance with integrity standards.

The company’s own tender documents for the Nairobi bid contained an eligibility requirement stating that bidders must not have been blacklisted or debarred from participating in tenders by any national or state government agencies, autonomous bodies or institutions.

Zoomlion met that criterion only by virtue of having subsequently resolved its debarment through negotiation.

Whether that resolution, which involved an admission of wrongdoing, satisfies the spirit of a requirement designed to exclude corrupt actors is a question that City Hall’s procurement officials have conspicuously declined to answer.

In Ghana itself, the record is substantially worse. Beginning in 2013, investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni exposed the scale of corruption within the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency, known as GYEEDA, in what became one of the most significant procurement scandals in Ghanaian public life.

A government ministerial committee confirmed the findings. Between 2009 and 2012, nearly 500 million dollars was spent through GYEEDA. Zoomlion and other companies within the Jospong Group were identified as primary beneficiaries.

The committee found that Zoomlion received payments for work not done and systematically overcharged the government. As a single representative instance, the company charged the government 25 million cedis more than was warranted for providing tricycles.

The committee recommended the discontinuation of Zoomlion’s contracts. Successive Ghanaian administrations declined to act.

The Ghanaian Auditor-General returned to Zoomlion repeatedly in subsequent years. One report documented a waste bin contract, awarded on a sole-source basis to the Jospong Group, that was inflated by at least 130 million cedis.

Another found that 98 million cedis had been paid to eleven Jospong-linked companies for fumigation services already covered under Zoomlion’s existing contractual obligations.

Police investigations into the fumigation agreements were launched but produced no convictions. Under the Youth Employment Agency initiative, the arrangement that structured Zoomlion’s sweeper programme, the government paid 850 cedis per worker per month, of which only 250 cedis reached the workers themselves.

Zoomlion retained 600 cedis per worker as a management fee, an arrangement that labour rights advocates characterised as structurally exploitative.

Despite cabinet directives under President John Mahama’s first administration ordering the termination of Zoomlion’s sanitation contract, the company continued rendering services to the state after its contract expired in February 2013 and accumulated debts owed to it by the government in excess of 450 million cedis.

In June 2025, President Mahama, returned to office after the 2024 elections, finally terminated the Youth Employment Agency contract with Zoomlion entirely, citing transparency concerns and the exploitative compensation structure. All payments made to Zoomlion after the original contract’s expiration were ordered into an audit.

Jospong Group Executive Chairman Dr Joseph Siaw Agyepong, the controlling figure behind Zoomlion and listed as a director of Zoomlion Waste Services in Kenya, is simultaneously facing contempt proceedings in a Ghanaian High Court. In late 2025, he and three others were charged with flouting court orders after allegedly entering disputed land and directing the destruction of property belonging to Royal Bell Investment Limited and Terraform Development Limited despite the existence of a court order and a penal notice served upon them.

The application before the Ghanaian court sought his committal to imprisonment.

STATE HOUSE FINGERPRINTS

The Zoomlion contract did not emerge in a vacuum within City Hall. The connection between State House and the award runs through a specific sequence of events. On August 13, 2025, President William Ruto attended the Devolution Conference in Homa Bay.

The Jospong Group of Companies had been allocated a stand at the conference.

President Ruto visited that stand on the opening day and publicly praised Zoomlion for its waste management technology and facilities in Ghana. Eight days later, Zoomlion Waste Services Limited was incorporated in Kenya.

President Ruto and Sakaja in a past event.

In a public address delivered in Nairobi on January 20, 2026, eleven days before the formal notification of award to Zoomlion, President Ruto confirmed directly that his administration was involved in the procurement process.

He said at the time: “The national government is going to support the county government to deal with the menace of waste and garbage in Nairobi. There is procurement the county is doing; we are supporting them so that we provide a lasting solution to that challenge.”

Sources with knowledge of the arrangement told Kenya Insights that awareness of the Zoomlion deal was confined to a small number of individuals at State House and City Hall throughout the procurement and contracting stages, with the details kept deliberately opaque.

Governor Johnson Sakaja, for his part, has defended the contract in public primarily by speaking around it: insisting that no county functions have been ceded to the national government, invoking Section 6 of the Urban Areas and Cities Act 2019 to justify special financing arrangements for Nairobi as Kenya’s capital, and pointing to the scale of the city’s waste generation, approximately 3,000 metric tonnes daily, as justification for an ambitious intervention.

He has not addressed the procurement irregularities identified by his own technical team, the eligibility questions arising from Zoomlion’s debarment history, or the absence of the financial safeguards that his officials found missing from the agreement.

THE MAN WHO DIED BEFORE THE WHITEWASH

Engineer Charles Ngugi Gathara had served for more than a decade as Deputy Director for Water and Sanitation at City Hall before being appointed to chair the Zoomlion tender evaluation committee. He was 49 years old.

On the morning of February 16, 2026, he arrived at JKIA ahead of the flight to Accra, intending to lead a delegation that would verify, after the fact, the capacity and facilities of a company to which a contract had already been awarded. Aviation workers had gone on strike that morning, disrupting departures.

While waiting for the situation to resolve, Gathara began vomiting and collapsed. He was pronounced dead. His colleagues, once a Kenya Airways flight eventually departed at 8.53 in the evening, flew to Accra without him and spent three days visiting Zoomlion’s operations at the company’s invitation. Engineer Gathara was buried on February 27, 2026, at his home village in Gathondo, Embu County.

The decision to proceed with the Ghana trip without him, on the day of his death, has drawn quiet condemnation within City Hall.

More fundamentally, the entire exercise exposed the character of what passed for due diligence in this procurement.

An evaluation committee, headed by a Water and Sanitation official rather than a specialist in solid waste management or PPP finance, was assembled to travel to a company’s premises and see a presentation prepared by that company, after the contract had already been awarded.

Walter Omwenga, the Deputy Director for Environment and Final Disposal who was among those who made the Accra trip, told Kenya Insights before the delegation departed that due diligence by definition required physically verifying that a bidder had the capacity described in their documents before a contract is signed. He did not explain why that verification was taking place after signing.

THE COURT STEPS IN

On March 5, 2026, Justice Moses Ado of the Milimani Commercial and Tax Division issued a conservatory order barring the Nairobi County Government, its Environment Chief Officer, its Director of Supply Chain Management and the County Secretary from executing or implementing the contract pending the hearing and determination of a petition challenging the deal.

The order was obtained on an application filed by Jeremy Kinyua Emilio, who contends that the award to Zoomlion was illegal and unconstitutional, among other grounds because it was executed without the required approval of the Attorney General.

Kinyua raised specific concerns about the Sh50 million bank guarantee submitted by Zoomlion as part of the tender, describing it as disproportionately low relative to the evident scale and value of the project.

The figure is consistent with procurement documents that deliberately obscured the total contract sum: the tender, as advertised, specified no price. The conservatory order was granted pending a mention scheduled for March 16, 2026, for further directions.

The petition additionally argues that at least two local companies are currently executing waste management contracts in Nairobi under earlier tenders, one for the supply of heavy equipment and machinery at Dandora, another for solid waste collection in Kibra, and that the Zoomlion concession threatens to displace those arrangements.

Some of those contractors had already encountered delays in receiving county payments at the time the Zoomlion contract was awarded, an irony that has not been lost on the market.

MOMBASA’S WARNING AND A NATIONAL PATTERN

Nairobi is not the first Kenyan county to be drawn into the Jospong Group’s orbit.

In October 2025, it emerged that Mombasa County, under Governor Abdulswamad Shariff Nassir, had already signed a 35-year waste management contract with a Jospong entity worth Sh17 billion.

The Centre for Litigation Trust, a Mombasa-based civil society organisation, filed a High Court petition demanding disclosure of the procurement process and public participation records.

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has opened an investigation into the Mombasa arrangement. That investigation was ongoing when Nairobi signed its own, structurally similar, contract four months later.

The pattern is being remarked upon by governance specialists with mounting alarm. Two of Kenya’s largest urban county governments have now awarded long-term waste management concessions to Jospong Group entities under procurement conditions that critics describe as opaque, legally deficient and designed to exclude competition.

There is documented concern within government circles that other counties may follow, creating the conditions for a nationwide monopoly over one of municipal government’s most revenue-generating and publicly sensitive functions, held by a foreign company that Ghana itself has now repudiated.

WHAT THE LAW REQUIRED, AND WHAT WAS DONE

The Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act 2015 requires that PPP projects above defined financial thresholds receive approval from the PPP Directorate and be subjected to competitive bidding processes designed to ensure value for money.

The PPP Act 2021 sets out a distinct regulatory framework for arrangements involving private financing, construction and long-term operation of public infrastructure.

By classifying the Zoomlion transaction as a local Request for Proposal rather than an international PPP concession, City Hall bypassed the PPP Directorate entirely, eliminated the requirement for international competitive advertising and compressed the timeline in a manner that precluded meaningful market participation.

Senior procurement officials who reviewed the process for this publication used the word “irregular” with consistent frequency.

Legal experts have separately warned that the structure of the contract, particularly the twenty-year tenure and the exclusive access to Dandora, is sufficient to sustain a successful legal challenge by any company that was denied the opportunity to compete.

The Nairobi County Assembly was not consulted. Public participation records, required by statute for projects of this duration and character, have not been made available.

The County Cabinet has not published any resolution approving the engagement on the disclosed terms. The terms themselves, including the financial model, the payment schedule, the revenue-sharing arrangement for recycling proceeds and the liability regime, have not been disclosed to the public whose assets and funds the contract deploys over the next two decades.

THE COST OF WHAT WAS NOT DONE

Dandora has operated for four decades as one of the most egregious examples of institutional failure in the history of Kenyan urban governance.

In February 2026, the Environment and Land Court awarded Sh25.8 million in damages to 1,032 waste pickers whose constitutional rights were found to have been violated by their prolonged exposure to air pollution at the site.

Both the Nairobi County Government and the National Environment Management Authority were found jointly responsible for permitting those conditions to persist.

That judgment landed in the same week as the Zoomlion contract was being defended in public by the same county government that had just been found complicit in the suffering of the people who live and work at the dump.

The city generates 3,000 metric tonnes of waste daily. The sector, if managed transparently and competitively, could sustain significant recycling revenue and waste-to-energy income for the public good.

The question that the Zoomlion contract poses is not whether Nairobi needs a modern waste management system. It does, urgently and without further delay.

The question is whether a company with Zoomlion’s documented record of bribery, fraudulent billing and exploitative labour practices, admitted in writing to the World Bank, exposed by an independent press and confirmed by multiple government bodies in its home country, and finally terminated by the government that spawned it, was the appropriate vehicle through which to pursue that transformation.

The answer that City Hall’s own technical team gave to that question, in language that its political principals have chosen to disregard, was an unambiguous no.