Mombasa Tycoon Jaffer’s Office Brags of ‘We Know the System’ After Court Temporarily Suspends Multimillion Defamation Case by Joho Family

The champagne moment came too early and too loudly. Within hours of a High Court decision that merely paused a high stakes defamation trial, word filtered out of a Mombasa boardroom that the fix was in. “We know the system,” associates linked to tycoon Mohamed Jaffer were heard boasting, a celebration that many within legal and business circles read not as confidence in the law but as a brazen taunt to it.

The optics were damning. A temporary procedural pause was being sold as a decisive victory, and the message was unmistakable. Power, not principle, still rules.

The case at the centre of the storm pits the Joho family against Jaffer’s camp over a vicious smear campaign that accused Abubakar Joho of drug trafficking and multibillion shilling fraud. The High Court granted prosecutors time to respond to a challenge on the admissibility of digital evidence, effectively suspending proceedings. That is all the court did. Yet the reaction from Jaffer’s inner circle suggested something else entirely, as if the judiciary had been bent to will rather than consulted through law. For a country struggling with public confidence in its courts, the celebration landed like a middle finger to justice.

Court records and testimonies already paint an unsettling picture. The alleged author of the defamatory material, a personal assistant to Jaffer, halted her prosecution by attacking the forensic report as defective under the Evidence Act. Missing signatures, absent certificates, a broken chain of custody and a handwritten police statement that somehow vanished from the court file were laid bare in open court. The involvement of Anti Terror Police Unit officers in what should have been a routine cybercrime investigation raised further eyebrows. These are not small clerical issues. They are the cracks through which impunity thrives.  

It is within this context that the “we know the system” boast becomes explosive. In the corridors of Mombasa and Nairobi, that phrase is not interpreted as legal brilliance. It is shorthand for something uglier. The insinuation is not subtle. It speaks to buying time, buying silence and, critics whisper, buying outcomes. No court has found bribery and no judge has been accused in these proceedings, but the culture that such bravado evokes is one Kenyans know too well. When powerful litigants celebrate procedural delays as total victories, the suspicion is inevitable. Justice delayed is justice denied, and delay has long been the currency of the well connected.

A deeper look at Jaffer’s long trail of disputes reinforces why this moment has struck a nerve. For decades he has dominated port logistics through Bulkstream, formerly Grainbulk Handlers, enjoying exclusivity that competitors describe as suffocating. Rivals who dared challenge that dominance tell a familiar story of relentless litigation, regulatory roadblocks and character attacks that arrive just as competition heats up. In this very case, Abubakar Joho testified that the smears began when he entered the port business, accusing Jaffer of orchestrating a campaign to eliminate a rival rather than compete fairly.  

Beyond Kenya, the pattern echoes. Licences revoked, projects stalled and bitter court fights in neighbouring countries have followed Jaffer’s expansion attempts. Each episode ends the same way, with the tycoon retreating not in disgrace but intact, his empire unshaken. Critics argue that survival itself has become the proof of impunity. Not because the allegations collapse on merit, but because the system bends long enough for storms to pass.

What enraged observers this week was not the High Court’s ruling, which was procedural and lawful, but the gloating that followed. Celebrating a pause as a conquest suggests foreknowledge, or at least the belief that outcomes can be managed. It feeds the darkest public suspicions about how justice works for billionaires. It also deepens the pain for families dragged through mud by allegations that courts have not tested and may yet vindicate as false.

The Joho family has made clear that this fight is not just about reputation but about the integrity of business competition and the courts themselves. Their supporters see the current suspension as a fork in the road. Either the judiciary reasserts itself and interrogates the evidence without fear or favour, or Kenya slides further into the belief that some men are simply too rich to lose.

For now, the celebration has done more damage than any ruling. It has hardened perceptions that Jaffer and his lieutenants do not fear the law because they believe they own the pathways around it. In a nation where faith in institutions is fragile, that swagger may prove more incriminating than any document challenged on a technicality. The case will return to court. When it does, the country will be watching not just for a verdict, but for proof that knowing the system is not the same as owning it.