The Man Who Starved Kenya’s Voice

In the bowels of Telposta Towers on Kenyatta Avenue, where the Ministry of Information, Communications and Digital Economy maintains its headquarters, a quiet administrative stranglehold has been methodically dismantling the operational capacity of Kenya’s oldest and most storied public information institution.

The instrument of this destruction is not a policy, not a budget cut from Treasury, and not an act of Parliament. It is, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter, a single official — the ministry’s Chief Finance Officer, identified in internal correspondence as M.M. Mosiria.

The consequences of Mosiria’s alleged conduct are no longer abstract. At this very moment, a team of government officials travelling on official duty is stranded in Eldoret, fundraising fuel money from the Government Advertising Agency to power their GK vehicle back to Nairobi — because their subsistence allowances were never processed, and their driver was dispatched with woefully inadequate fuel allocations. They are not the first. They will not be the last.

OFFICERS PAY FROM THEIR POCKETS, TEAMS MAROONED ON THE ROAD

The pattern has become routine. In early May 2026, a team of officers from the Ministry’s Communications and Digital Economy directorate travelled to Naivasha on official assignment. Three weeks on, their subsistence allowances remain unpaid. The mission was completed. The receipts were filed. The officers went home lighter in the wallet and heavier with resentment — still awaiting disbursements that should have preceded their departure.

The situation reached a particularly ignominious nadir on one occasion documented by sources, when officers returning to Nairobi from an upcountry posting were compelled to pass a hat among themselves — drawing from personal savings — to purchase fuel for their government vehicle. The driver had been allocated insufficient fuel for the return journey, and the officers themselves had received no travelling allowances whatsoever. What should have been a routine official mission became an exercise in self-financing public service.

“Officers had to fundraise from their own personal savings to fuel a GK vehicle while travelling back to Nairobi from official duties — the driver had been given inadequate fuel, and no one had been paid their allowances.”

The latest crisis centres on the flagship Media Council of Kenya’s inaugural Journalism Clubs Expo scheduled to take place in Kakamega, Western Kenya — a premiere event designed to mentor secondary school students in the craft and ethics of journalism. The Media Council, a sister agency operating under the same ministry, invited the Kenya News Agency to partner in the event: to mount a historical exhibition tracing the evolution of Kenyan media, provide adjudication expertise, and sponsor a trophy for the best journalism club in interview skills. An official memo seeking facilitation and travelling allowances for the nominated officers was submitted to Mosiria’s office a full week before the event. It sat there, untouched.

Efforts to reach the CFO bore no fruit. No approval was issued. No communication was returned to the Directorate explaining the delay or the grounds for inaction. The memo simply festered in his in-tray, holding hostage both the officers’ livelihoods and an event that Kenya’s youth were counting on.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF A CHOKEHOLD

Sources within the ministry describe Mosiria’s modus operandi as one of calculated passivity. Memos land on his desk and disappear into administrative purgatory. Officers nominated for official duties are dispatched without their allowances, or not dispatched at all when events cannot wait. Meanwhile, according to ministry insiders, certain officials enjoy what one source bitterly called ‘sky team’ privileges — a sardonic reference to a coterie of officers whose travel approvals are processed with alacrity, their foreign and domestic assignments funded without friction.

The disparity raises uncomfortable questions about the criteria governing Mosiria’s approvals. Sources allege that he has pocketed a very senior official within the ministry hierarchy, a relationship that is said to insulate him from accountability and render him effectively untouchable by other relatively senior staff at headquarters. The allegation, if substantiated, would constitute a textbook case of institutional capture — a mid-level bureaucrat leveraging a patron relationship to operate beyond the reach of the ordinary chain of command.

Adding a further layer of opacity is a family connection that sources have flagged: Mosiria is said to be related to a Mosiria of the Nairobi County Government. Whether that connection bears any relevance to his professional conduct or alleged protections is a matter that would require independent investigation, but the coincidence has not escaped the attention of ministry staff who feel powerless to challenge him.

“He is untouchable. No one can question him. He has someone very senior in his corner — and he knows it.” — Ministry insider, speaking on condition of anonymity

DEVELOPMENT FUNDS, DILAPIDATED STATIONS AND GHOST REFURBISHMENTS

The financial strangling inflicted on the Directorate of Information is not limited to travel allowances. Multiple sources confirm that field stations — the county and sub-county information offices that form the connective tissue of KNA’s nationwide news-gathering infrastructure — are in a state of advanced deterioration. Computers are obsolete or absent. Camera equipment is outdated and lacks accessories. Internet connectivity, essential for the rapid sharing of news gathered across the country’s 47 counties and their sub-county offices, is either non-existent or too slow for professional use.

What makes this particularly damning is not the absence of development funds — those funds exist and are disbursed — but where they are alleged to be channelled. Sources with detailed knowledge of the ministry’s internal expenditure patterns accuse Mosiria of directing huge sums of development budget to stations that have already been refurbished, while genuinely dilapidated field stations continue to rot. The motivation, sources allege, is selfish financial interest — a pattern consistent with the ghost project architecture that has plundered Kenya’s public institutions across multiple sectors.

The consequence is that KNA, which operates 47 county offices and 25 sub-county stations across the country, cannot deliver on its mandate. National days go uncovered and unarchived. State functions are missed. The historical media record that KNA was created in 1963 to build and protect — the authoritative documentary memory of Kenya’s postcolonial journey — is being silently eroded, not by editorial failure, but by deliberate financial sabotage.

A BUREAUCRACY REPORTING FULL SPEND WHILE OFFICERS STARVE

Perhaps the most damning allegation levelled against the finance department is one of systematic fiscal deception. Despite the operational paralysis visible across the Directorate of Information — the unpaid allowances, the grounded officers, the missed events — sources allege that the ministry’s financial reports submitted to the National Treasury record total utilisation of allocated funds. On paper, the money is spent. On the ground, directorates are barely meeting their performance targets.

This divergence between reported expenditure and operational reality points to one of two possibilities, neither of them benign. Either funds are being misapplied to activities and recipients not contemplated by approved budgets, or the accounting itself is unreliable — and possibly fraudulent. Either scenario demands the immediate attention of the Controller of Budget, the National Treasury, and the Auditor General.

KNA’s Director of Information, Joseph Kipkoech, who was appointed in October 2023 with a mandate to modernise the agency, finds his reform agenda effectively paralysed by the financial chokehold at headquarters. Media experts and government insiders who spoke to this publication confirmed that by mid-2025, KNA’s ambitions for modernisation had stalled — and the stall is not for lack of editorial will.

WHAT IS BEING DESTROYED

The Kenya News Agency is not merely a government mouthpiece, though it has long served that function. It is, more fundamentally, Kenya’s primary national archival agency for media materials — the institutional memory of a country that came into being sixty-two years ago and has been documenting its own becoming ever since. That archive — of independence, of elections, of national disasters and triumphs, of the ordinary and extraordinary lives of Kenyans from Mandera to Kwale — is irreplaceable.

When KNA’s officers cannot attend a national day because no one processed their travel allowances, that day goes unrecorded in the national archive. When field stations lack functioning cameras and internet, the stories of entire counties vanish before they are told. When a team is stranded in Eldoret fundraising fuel, the assignments that brought them there go unfinished. This is not bureaucratic inconvenience. This is the systematic destruction of a public institution — and it is happening, sources insist, with the connivance or at minimum the wilful negligence of the man at the finance desk in Telposta Towers.

“KNA has become a shadow of her former glory due to financial suffocation — not from Treasury, but from within its own ministry headquarters.”

THE RECKONING THAT IS OWED

M.M. Mosiria did not respond to requests for comment. The Ministry of Information, Communications and Digital Economy had not issued a statement on the matter at the time of publication. Kenya Insights has, however, written to the Principal Secretary of the State Department for Information and to the Cabinet Secretary’s office seeking formal responses, which will be published in full upon receipt.

What the evidence gathered by this publication makes clear is that a systemic governance failure is unfolding at Telposta Towers, one that demands immediate intervention by oversight bodies. The Public Service Commission should investigate the conduct of the CFO and the chain of command that has allowed this situation to persist. The National Treasury should audit the ministry’s expenditure reports against actual operational outputs. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission should examine whether the pattern of misdirected development funds meets the threshold for investigation.

The officers stranded in Eldoret, passing the hat for fuel, are not just victims of poor administration. They are witnesses to something more troubling: a public institution being hollowed out from the inside, one unprocessed memo at a time.