SEX SCANDAL ROCKS KISUMU POLYTECHNIC: Top Officials Linked as Secretary Accuses New Council Chairman of Naivasha Advances

A bombshell complaint lodged at two police stations and copied to a battery of human rights bodies has thrust the Kisumu National Polytechnic into a scandal of its own making, exposing what sources close to the institution describe as a culture of entitlement at the top of its governing council. At the centre of the storm is Engineer Judah Abekah, the newly installed chairman of the institution’s Governing Council, who stands accused by a senior member of staff of sexually harassing her during an official council retreat in Naivasha. The woman, Mrs Laetitia Opiyo, a secretary attached to the office of the chief principal, has filed a detailed complaint that lays bare a web of pressure, coercion, and alleged procurement interference reaching deep into the council’s inner sanctum.

“She resisted the advances of Abekah who promised to promote her if she yielded to his sexual demands.”

The complaint, seen by this publication in full, reveals that Opiyo did not walk into the Naivasha encounter alone or by coincidence.

According to her account, the chief principal’s own driver, a man named Peter Ochieng, was the instrument used to manoeuvre her toward Abekah’s location at the Lake Naivasha Resort, where two other council members, Duncan Oginga and Ishmael Noo, were also present. Opiyo says she was contacted and urged to join the gathering, which she declined on grounds of professional ethics.

What followed, according to the complaint, was a campaign of pressure, inducement, and ultimately retaliation.

Opiyo states that Ochieng made repeated telephone calls reproaching her for failing to cooperate with the council chairman, and that text messages from the driver to her phone make the pressure campaign explicit.

This publication has seen those texts.

In them, Ochieng’s language is blunt and reproachful, condemning Opiyo for her refusal to comply with what reads unmistakably as a directive from above.

Ochieng, now officially indicted and awaiting further disciplinary and potentially criminal action, has attempted to distance himself from the messages by claiming they were intended for a different recipient.

Investigators and colleagues who have seen the content of the exchanges find that explanation difficult to sustain.

The complaint additionally reveals a dimension that turns this from a straightforward harassment allegation into something considerably darker.

Before the advances began in earnest, Abekah allegedly demanded to know why a contractor named Chaju Builders had not yet been paid.

That question, posed by the council chairman to a secretary who holds no payment-authorisation authority, reads to investigators less like administrative inquiry and more like leverage.

Chaju Builders is no small name in the Kisumu government contracting landscape.

Records show the company has accumulated hundreds of millions of shillings in public contracts across city and institutional projects in the region, including a Sh394 million construction project at the polytechnic itself, funded through a World Bank initiative.

COMPLAINT FILED ACROSS FIVE BODIES

Opiyo has ensured that her grievance will not be quietly smothered.

The complaint has been formally copied to the Federation of Kenya Women Lawyers, the Commission on Administrative Justice, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, and the Witness Protection Agency.

Cases have been registered at both the Naivasha Police Station, where the incident occurred, and the Kondele Police Station in Kisumu.

That spread of institutions suggests Opiyo entered this fight knowing that single-point complaints in Kenya have a habit of disappearing and that the only defence against institutional capture is parallelism.

Colleagues who were present at the Naivasha retreat have corroborated at least part of her account. According to sources with direct knowledge of events, Opiyo was subsequently found in a state of visible distress by fellow members of staff who described her as dazed and shocked.

Those colleagues intervened and helped remove her from the immediate situation.

Sources say the episode left witnesses shaken, not because it was shocking by the norms they had come to know inside the institution, but because it had happened so openly and with such apparent confidence on the part of those involved.

“Senior officials within the State Department for TVET are attempting to shield the chairman while intimidating junior staff with threats of demotion if the case is not withdrawn.”

Most alarming is the reported conduct of officials within the State Department for Technical and Vocational Education and Training, the national oversight body for institutions like Kisumu National Polytechnic.

Multiple sources, speaking to this publication independently, allege that senior figures within the TVET directorate have moved to insulate Abekah from accountability.

Junior members of staff at the polytechnic have reportedly been warned that their employment is at risk if they support the complainant or refuse to distance themselves from her account.

The use of demotion threats to silence witnesses in an active harassment investigation is not merely a human resources matter. It is, depending on how investigators choose to characterise it, an act of obstruction.

AN INSTITUTION WITH A HISTORY OF CRISIS

The sexual harassment allegations arrive at an institution that has spent the better part of two years lurching from one scandal to another.

Any honest examination of the Kisumu National Polytechnic’s recent record must begin with September 2025, when the institution was forcibly shut down after students staged a week-long uprising that culminated in running battles with riot police. The trigger was money.

The Kisumu National Polytechnic Students Association, known as KINAPOSA, led by its president Silas Adem, accused the management of charging students as much as Sh88,000 per year in tuition and associated levies, a figure they said exceeded the government-stipulated cap of between Sh67,000 and Sh72,000 by at least Sh16,000 per head.

With a student population that was then documented at over 15,000, Adem told the Ministry of Education directly that the arithmetic pointed to a scheme of staggering proportion.

If the excess charge held across the student body, the institution would have been collecting upwards of Sh240 million per year beyond what policy permitted, with no transparency about where that money was going.

Chief Principal Catherine Kelonye ordered the institution’s closure on September 19, 2025, through an internal memo that acknowledged students had raised serious allegations of corruption, mismanagement, and unexplained fee increases.

She did not, in that memo, deny the substance of those allegations.

The Ministry of Education constituted a formal investigation committee within a week, summoning both KINAPOSA and the institution’s senior management to present evidence before the committee at the Resource Centre Board Room on September 29, 2025.

The Principal Secretary for TVET, operating under reference MOE/TVET/2/21/1, formally appointed that committee on September 26, 2025.

Students had demanded two things above all else: that Kelonye and the finance manager step aside pending an impartial forensic audit, and that fees improperly collected be refunded. Neither demand was ultimately met.

The ministry’s representative, Maryan Hassan, confirmed at an October 24, 2025 meeting chaired by Kisumu County Commissioner Benson Leparmorijo that a review of the institution’s financial records had found no unauthorised alterations to the approved fee structure.

Hassan acknowledged that certain levies existed above the base fee, but characterised them as government-sanctioned and applied uniformly across national polytechnics.

Kelonye was confirmed in her position.

The polytechnic reopened in phases beginning October 27, 2025, with examination candidates returning first.

What that outcome meant for the students who had been charged the excess amounts, and for the principle that institutional misconduct carries consequences, remains a question this publication considers unresolved.

Adem’s accusation that a group within management was enriching itself from student payments was never publicly answered with the forensic detail his petition demanded.

The finances of the institution have not, to this publication’s knowledge, been subjected to the independent forensic audit students sought.

THE CONTRACTOR AT THE CENTRE

The mention of Chaju Builders in Opiyo’s complaint is not incidental.

The company has been the principal contractor on the polytechnic’s most significant and most heavily funded infrastructure project in its recent history, the Regional Flagship TVET Institute for Textile Technology, a Sh394 million construction contract awarded under the World Bank’s East Africa Skills for Transformation and Regional Integration Project, known as EASTRIP.

The groundbreaking ceremony for that facility was held on February 23, 2022, with the presence of then-Cabinet Secretary for Education George Magoha, Kisumu Governor Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, and TVET Principal Secretary Mike Kuria. The total EASTRIP-funded programme at the polytechnic was valued at Sh1.08 billion.

Chaju Builders is not new to large government contracts.

The company had previously been awarded a Sh659 million non-motorised transport facility contract by Kisumu City, and was publicly recognised by city management as its best contractor of the year for workmanship on an earlier phase of that project.

For a council chairman to allegedly invoke an unpaid Chaju Builders invoice in the same conversation where sexual pressure is applied to a subordinate raises questions that go well beyond personal misconduct.

It raises questions about who within the institution’s governance structure has financial influence over that contractor, and what relationship, if any, connects payment decisions to the kind of access that was reportedly being solicited in Naivasha.

Sources within the polytechnic, speaking on strict condition of anonymity, say the Chaju Builders payment question had been a source of internal tension for some time before the Naivasha retreat, and that the contractor’s invoices had been caught in administrative processes whose delays were not entirely explained by paperwork alone.

This publication put specific questions to both Engineer Abekah and a spokesperson for the polytechnic’s administration regarding the contractor payment inquiry and its proximity to the harassment allegation.

No substantive response had been received at the time of publication.

COUNCIL MEMBER DYNAMICS UNDER SCRUTINY

The presence of two other council members at the Naivasha gathering described in Opiyo’s complaint, Duncan Oginga and Ishmael Noo, places the incident in a context that is not merely one individual’s alleged predation but a question about the collective character of the body that governs the institution.

A council retreat is, by its nature, a formal occasion at which members exercise their oversight function.

That function, according to Opiyo’s account, was accompanied in Naivasha by an apparent willingness on the part of at least some members to participate in, or at minimum to be present during, an attempt to coerce a junior member of staff.

Neither Oginga nor Noo have publicly responded to queries about their presence at the gathering and their knowledge of what occurred.

This publication reached out through available institutional channels and received no response.

The Ministry of Education has also not publicly commented on whether the conduct of council members falls within the scope of any ongoing investigation.

The polytechnic’s council has in recent history operated under what insiders describe as a compressed timeline of change.

Abekah is identified in the complaint as the new chairman, implying his appointment is recent.

His predecessor, Engineer Meshack Kidenda, whose name appears in institutional records from as recently as 2024, was photographed with Chief Principal Kelonye at EASTRIP project site visits. The transition between the two chairmanships, and what it meant for the governance of a body overseeing over a billion shillings in World Bank-funded infrastructure, has not been publicly documented by the ministry.

THE WOMEN IN THE LINE OF FIRE

The detail that has stayed with sources inside the polytechnic is not the brazenness of the alleged approach in Naivasha, nor even the scale of the fee scandal that preceded it.

It is the pattern.

Opiyo is not described in her complaint as the first woman at the institution to face this kind of pressure. Multiple staff members, speaking in terms that were careful enough to avoid attribution, indicate that the environment within the polytechnic’s administration has for some time been one in which female employees at various levels understand that advancement and security are not uncoupled from compliance with the expectations of powerful men.

The complaint is unusual not because the dynamics it describes are novel, but because someone wrote them down and sent the letter to five separate institutions.

The Federation of Kenya Women Lawyers, which received a copy of the complaint, has in recent years pursued a number of workplace harassment cases in educational institutions.

Their involvement signals that Opiyo’s complaint will be tracked by legal professionals who understand the full weight of what the Sexual Offences Act and the Employment Act require of institutions when harassment is reported.

The Commission on Administrative Justice, separately, has the mandate to investigate maladministration in public institutions.

The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights has the authority to investigate violations of constitutional rights in the workplace.

The Witness Protection Agency’s inclusion in the notification list is the most telling detail of all.

It says, without saying it explicitly, that Opiyo believes she may need protection from within the institution that employs her.

“The inclusion of the Witness Protection Agency in the complaint’s notification list says, without saying it explicitly, that Opiyo believes she may need protection from within the institution that employs her.”

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY LOOKS LIKE

The trajectory of institutional accountability in Kenya’s TVET sector does not inspire confidence.

The 2025 student crisis at Kisumu National Polytechnic ended with Kelonye confirmed in post, the forensic audit that students demanded never conducted, and the institution’s gates reopened with no named consequence for any individual.

That outcome was not exceptional. It was, in the view of education sector observers, a fairly standard resolution of the sort that happens when the people who would be harmed by accountability are students and junior staff, and the people who would be harmed by its absence are the same.

The sexual harassment complaint changes the calculation in one critical way. Civil society is watching, and so, apparently, are the police in two counties.

The texts from Peter Ochieng to Laetitia Opiyo exist.

They have been seen.

Ochieng himself has been indicted, which means at least one institutional actor has acknowledged that something improper occurred.

The question is whether the institutions that received Opiyo’s complaint will treat it as what it appears to be, which is evidence of serious misconduct at the apex of a public institution managing hundreds of millions in donor and government funds, or whether the standard architecture of delay and deterrence will once again assert itself.

Engineer Judah Abekah, Duncan Oginga, and Ishmael Noo were contacted for comment. Chief Principal Catherine Kelonye was contacted for comment.

The TVET Principal Secretary’s office was asked whether any investigation into the conduct of the council chairman was underway, and whether staff members had been warned against cooperating with investigators.

None of the parties had responded substantively at the time of going to press.

The Kisumu National Polytechnic was built, and continues to be funded in substantial part by international money, on the premise that it exists to educate and equip the youth of Kenya’s Nyanza region.

The men and women who govern it, whether on the council or in the principal’s office, hold that mandate in trust.

The events described in Laetitia Opiyo’s complaint suggest that trust is being abused in ways that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with power.