Talanta Stadium Construction Cost Inflated By Sh11 Billion, Audit Reveals

Kenya’s most expensive sporting infrastructure project has been shaken to its foundations after Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu tore open the books of the Talanta Sports City Stadium and found a jaw-dropping Sh10.85 billion gap that nobody in government can explain.

In a damning new audit of the Ministry of Defence accounts for the 2024/25 financial year, Gathungu reveals that while the National Treasury had approved Sh35 billion for the 60,000-seater stadium in Nairobi, the contract that was quietly signed with a foreign contractor on May 26, 2024, stood at a colossal Sh45.85 billion. That is Sh10.85 billion more than what Parliament was told the project would cost, and not a shilling of that difference has been accounted for.

“This is against a contract amount of Sh45.85 billion, resulting in an unsupported price variation of Sh10.85 billion,” the audit states, in language that is measured but devastating.

“Talanta Sports City contracting is one of those greatest heists to ever happen under the Kenya Kwanza regime.” –Justin Muturi, former Attorney-General

The scale of the scandal becomes even clearer when placed in context. The Sh10.85 billion that has apparently evaporated into thin air is enough to build 9.5 kilometres of the Rironi-Mau Summit dual carriageway. It could fund the primary school education of 4.8 million Kenyan children for an entire year, or keep 487,000 secondary school students in class over the same period. The Kenya Kwanza administration has spent years telling Kenyans it has no money for classrooms and textbooks, yet here, buried in a stadium contract, is enough to educate nearly five million children.

AG Kept in the Dark

What makes the scandal all the more explosive is what the auditor found missing from the contract file: any sign that then-Attorney-General Justin Muturi had ever been asked to clear the deal. Section 134 of the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act is unambiguous. Every government contract worth more than Sh5 billion must pass through the AG’s office before it is signed. The Talanta contract, at Sh45.85 billion, was nearly ten times that threshold.

Muturi told reporters this was no accident. “Clearance was never sought from me,” he said bluntly. “Talanta Sports City contracting is one of those greatest heists to ever happen under the Kenya Kwanza regime.”

Muturi said he had raised alarm when he noticed that the Ministry of Sports had been stripped of its procuring role in favour of the Ministry of Defence, a move that looked, from the outside, like deliberate bureaucratic maneuvering to sidestep normal oversight channels. “I told them that this is against the procurement law, which requires the clearance of the Attorney-General for any contract above Sh5 billion,” he said. No one listened.

Procurement Laws Ripped Apart

The illegality does not end with the missing AG clearance. The Auditor-General found that the contract was awarded through a direct procurement method, bypassing competitive tendering entirely. Kenya’s procurement law demands that open tendering be the default. Direct procurement is only permitted under a narrow set of exceptional circumstances, such as war, a natural disaster, or when a supplier holds exclusive rights over the goods or services required.

None of those conditions applied to a football stadium. “The contract was awarded through a direct procurement method which did not meet competitive procurement and direct procurement criteria demanded by the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act of 2015,” the audit report states. The contract was handed to China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), a subsidiary of the majority state-owned China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), without Kenya going to the open market.

Half Built, Barely Paid

As of June 1, 2025, the Talanta Sports City was only 44.54 percent complete, with 15 months still to run before the expected completion date. Yet, of the Sh45.85 billion contract, only Sh2 billion had been paid to the contractor, a mere 4.5 percent of the total sum.

Talanta Stadium.

Under the contract terms, Kenya will be charged interest at three percentage points above the Central Bank of Kenya’s average base lending rate on any payments that fall overdue. The meter is already running.

To manage the mounting payment obligations, the government on July 22, 2025, signed a deed of assumption of payment obligations.

Under the arrangement, Defence Principal Secretary Patrick Mariru, Sports Kenya and a Trustee effectively transferred the duty of making future payments to the Trustee.

The project is being financed through a bond listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, backed by the Sports and Arts Social Development Fund (SASDF), with repayments estimated at Sh3.4 billion every six months. Mariru did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Sh100 Billion by the Time It Is Done?

The audit findings arrive hard on the heels of warnings from Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro, a former chair of the National Assembly’s Budget and Appropriations Committee, who has claimed that by the time the interest costs, penalties and bond servicing are fully settled, Kenya could end up paying in excess of Sh100 billion for a stadium whose contract value is Sh45.85 billion.

Nyoro was removed from the powerful budget committee following political friction with President William Ruto.

Gathungu has warned that only a special audit will be able to determine the true value for money from the project, as the full details of the funding model were never provided to her office.

“The full details of the model have not been provided, hence the need for a special audit to determine the true value for money in the achievement of the project,” the audit states.

The 60,000-seat Talanta Sports City was groundbroken on March 1, 2024, at the Jamhuri Grounds along Ngong Road in Nairobi.

It is one of the key venues Kenya is preparing for the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations, which the country will co-host with Uganda and Tanzania. President Ruto has promised the stadium would be renamed the Raila Odinga International Stadium upon completion.

With CAF already issuing urgent safety upgrade directives and giving Kenya a three-month deadline to address critical infrastructure concerns at its AFCON venues, the political and financial scandal now engulfing the country’s flagship stadium project could not have come at a worse time.