THE POISON THAT WON’T GO AWAY: Why Rejected Fuel From One Petroleum May Still Be Circulating Despite Assurances

When Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi stood before the nation on Tuesday, April 7, and ordered the immediate withdrawal of 60,000 tonnes of condemned super petrol from the Kenya Pipeline Company’s storage network, his directive arrived with the gravity of a man trying to unring a bell.

By then, according to multiple industry executives who spoke to Kenya Insights, the fuel was not waiting obediently in a tank to be recalled.

It had already been absorbed into the veins of a national pipeline system that does not segregate cargoes, does not reserve space by importer, and does not operate with the kind of surgical precision that would allow any single consignment of tainted petrol to be extracted from a system that, by its very design, blends everything it receives.

The question that Kenya’s energy governance apparatus refuses to formally answer — and that Wandayi and the Kenya Pipeline Company have conspicuously avoided — is whether millions of Kenyans who filled their tanks over the Easter holiday weekend were unknowingly consuming petrol laced with levels of sulphur, manganese, and benzene that the Kenya Bureau of Standards has explicitly declared unacceptable for the Kenyan market.

THE PIPELINE DOES NOT LIE

Understanding the catastrophic implications of One Petroleum’s assurance requires understanding how KPC’s infrastructure actually works. When a petroleum tanker docks at the Port of Mombasa and discharges its cargo, the product does not flow into a dedicated tank bearing the importer’s name. It flows directly into the national pipeline system by grade — petrol into the petrol stream, diesel into the diesel stream, and dual-purpose kerosene into its own channel. KPC’s depots at Kipevu, Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, and Kisumu all receive product from the same undifferentiated streams.

Three separate oil marketing company executives, speaking anonymously to avoid what one described as fear of State reprisals, confirmed to Kenya Insights and Business Daily that the moment One Petroleum’s MT Paloma discharged its 68,000-tonne cargo at Mombasa between March 27 and 29, that product was irreversibly blended with whatever was already in the national system.

“KPC does not segregate fuel at the discharge point. The product is stored separately for each grade. One Petroleum cannot retrieve the fuel that they supplied.”

The statement above, attributed to one of three industry executives, encapsulates what the government has been unable to publicly concede: that the withdrawal order issued by Wandayi, legally and politically sound as it may have been, is physically impossible to execute.

Oil marketers who had already booked cargo under One Petroleum’s consignment — including Astrol Petroleum with 2.35 million litres, Aftah Petroleum with 2.065 million litres, Be Energy with 636,657 litres, and Ainushamsi Energy with 363,029 litres — had already paid their taxes to the Kenya Revenue Authority and were, in all likelihood, lifting product from a pipeline that no longer distinguished between good and bad fuel.

THE EASTER WINDOW: WHEN OVERSIGHT WENT SILENT

The timeline is damning precisely because of what it reveals about the window during which oversight was absent. MT Paloma docked and discharged between March 27 and 29. The Easter public holiday weekend began on April 3. The DCI arrests of Petroleum Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban, KPC Managing Director Joe Sang, and EPRA Director-General Daniel Kiptoo Bargoria, though also conducted on the night of April 2, triggered immediate resignations that left the regulatory apparatus effectively headless during one of the highest fuel-demand periods in Kenya’s annual calendar.

Business Daily, citing State fears, reported that the government ordered the exit of the consignment from the country precisely because of concerns that part of the emergency cargo had already been consumed over the Easter holiday.

That phrasing, embedded in an official government narrative, is as close to an admission as Kenya’s political class has yet managed: the fuel may already be gone, pumped into the tanks of millions of motorists who had no way of knowing that the petrol they purchased had been flagged by a KPC quality assurance manager as non-compliant with national standards.

The KPC quality assurance manager at the centre of the scandal reportedly halted distribution upon testing the consignment and escalated the matter through internal channels.

Yet the internal disagreement that followed — over whether the product should be released into the market before a full investigation could be conducted — suggests that pressure was applied to release the fuel anyway. The question of who applied that pressure, and why, is at the heart of the DCI’s criminal investigation.

A WAIVER THAT OPENED THE GATE

The bureaucratic infrastructure that allowed substandard fuel to enter Kenya’s system at all was constructed through an extraordinary set of regulatory waivers that bypassed the very safeguards designed to protect consumers.

On March 26, 2026, then-PS Mohamed Liban wrote to Kenya Bureau of Standards Managing Director Esther Ngari, seeking a temporary waiver on standard pre-export verification procedures.

His rationale was the disruption caused by the US-Iran conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which had trapped 85,000 tonnes of Gulf Energy petrol at the Port of Jebel Ali in Dubai.

The letter Liban wrote to Ngari acknowledged that ship-to-ship transfer methods, which the emergency importers were using, meant that cargo originally destined for other markets — markets with different, often lower, quality standards — might not have received the standard certificate of conformity issued by KEBS-authorised agents at the load port. In plain language: Kenya was asking its standards regulator to allow in fuel that had been tested for another country’s requirements, not Kenya’s.

What followed was even more remarkable. A letter dated March 28, signed by Trade and Investment Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui and addressed to Energy CS Wandayi, granted a waiver on the petroleum products on the grounds that they contained high levels of manganese, sulphur, and benzene. Kinyanjui listed six conditions for the waiver. The fuel came in anyway.

The conditions, whatever they were, were not sufficient to prevent a cargo that the nation’s own standards body acknowledged was non-compliant from flowing into the KPC system.

“Waiver is hereby granted on the petroleum that has high levels of manganese, sulphur and benzene.” — Trade CS Lee Kinyanjui, leaked letter dated March 28, 2026

THE JAFFER NETWORK: WHO STANDS BEHIND ONE PETROLEUM

One Petroleum Limited is not a company that emerged from nowhere to win a Sh11.8 billion emergency fuel contract. Corporate registry documents reveal a firm whose shareholder structure includes Mohamed Jaffer, Mujtaba Jaffer, Ali Abbas Jaffer, and Mohamed Husein Jaffer — members of a prominent Mombasa business dynasty with long roots in the coastal petroleum trade.

The presence of Mbaraki Holdings Limited, a Mauritius-registered entity holding 41,098 ordinary shares, introduces an offshore financial dimension that investigators note is commonly used to obscure beneficial ownership and move value across jurisdictions beyond the reach of Kenya’s financial monitoring systems.

Preliminary DCI findings have reportedly indicated that the fuel itself originated with Saudi Aramco before being sold to a separate international intermediary and then redirected through One Petroleum to Kenya.

This chain of custody — from a legitimate sovereign supplier, through an offshore resale mechanism, into an emergency procurement corridor that bypassed normal verification — is the architecture investigators say may constitute criminal economic sabotage.

The DCI has confirmed it is liaising with investigative agencies in other countries under Mutual Legal Assistance frameworks to trace the full provenance of the cargo.

Searches of suspects’ homes during the April 2 DCI raids reportedly recovered close to Sh500 million in cash and assets, according to sources cited by Kenya Today, believed by investigators to potentially represent proceeds from the petroleum transactions under scrutiny.

No charges have been formally filed, and all five detained officials — Liban, Sang, Kiptoo, Deputy Director of Petroleum Joseph Wafula, and KPC Supply and Logistics Manager Joel Mburu — were released on Sh100,000 police cash bail each pending court appearance.

THE DATA WAS FALSIFIED: A MANUFACTURED CRISIS

The scandal takes on an even more sinister dimension when the origins of the emergency procurement are examined.

According to a statement from the Chief of Staff and Head of Public Service Felix Koskei, primary duty bearers in the petroleum supply chain are alleged to have manipulated data on in-country fuel stocks, deliberately creating a false impression of an impending supply shortfall.

That falsified data was then used to trigger the NSCC directive that instructed Liban to seek alternative fuel sources.

The NSCC meeting that approved the emergency importation on March 9 was copied to an extraordinary roster of the country’s top security chiefs: National Intelligence Service Director-General Noordin Haji, Chief of Defence Forces Charles Kahariri, Inspector-General of Police Douglas Kanja, and three principal secretaries.

The political cover was immaculate.

If the data on which that NSCC recommendation was based had been manipulated, then the entire emergency procurement chain — from the NSCC directive, through Liban’s letters, through Kinyanjui’s waiver, to One Petroleum’s discharge at Mombasa — was built on a manufactured crisis.

Before Uganda could serve as a regional buffer, Kenya had reportedly approached Kampala requesting to borrow fuel stocks as a stop-gap. Uganda rejected the request, partly because Ugandan petrol stations had already raised pump prices over fears of regional shortages linked to the Middle East conflict.

Kenya then pivoted to the emergency import contracts awarded to One Petroleum and Oryx Energies.

That Uganda, which depends on Kenya’s pipeline infrastructure for its own fuel supplies, was also drawn into the regional disruption illustrates how a domestic manipulation of stock data can have cascading cross-border consequences.

THE PIPELINE’S SEVEN LABORATORIES AND THE ALLEGATION OF INSTITUTIONAL CAPTURE

KPC operates seven ISO-accredited laboratories across its depot network. Under normal circumstances, those laboratories represent an insurmountable quality firewall between suspect fuel and Kenyan consumers.

The problem, as described by insiders to Nation Media Group’s investigative team, is that those laboratories are only as independent as the officials who manage the institutions around them.

If the regulator and the pipeline company are in institutional alignment — which the alleged collusion of Kiptoo and Sang would suggest — then quality certificates can cease to be a defence and instead become what one source called a mask for the fraud.

The DCI is specifically investigating how the consignment passed through KPC’s quality assurance framework. A KPC quality assurance manager reportedly flagged concerns, halted distribution, and escalated the issue.

But the internal disagreement that followed suggests that someone above that manager pushed for distribution regardless. Who gave that instruction, and at whose behest, remains the centrepiece of the criminal probe.

FUEL RATIONING, ENGINE DAMAGE FEARS, AND THE KTA WARNING

Even as the government maintained that fuel supply was stable, reality unravelled conspicuously at the pump. The Kenya Transporters Association formally wrote to EPRA, the Ministry of Energy, KPC, and all oil marketing companies on April 8, warning of paralysing fuel shortages along key logistics corridors.

Transporters reported being turned away at fuel stations, forced to buy in small quantities across multiple stops, and experiencing a complete withdrawal of credit facilities by oil marketing companies. The KTA letter described the situation as making it nearly impossible to sustain long-haul operations.

Motorists had already been raising alarm about fuel quality even before the scandal broke publicly, with reports of engine damage linked to contaminated petroleum products circulating in the weeks before the DCI arrests.

Martin Chomba, chair of the Petroleum Outlets Association of Kenya, noted in an April 7 interview that some shipments may contain higher sulphur content than Kenya’s preferred standards, acknowledging that while technically usable, such fuel raises compliance questions and could affect vehicle performance.

The National Assembly’s Energy Committee summoned Wandayi to appear before it on April 9, alongside KPC and EPRA, to explain both the substandard fuel and the worsening shortage.

“Every motorist, every hawker, every schoolchild breathing roadside air in Nairobi is an unwitting participant.” — Kenya Insights, April 2026

THE KPC IPO FALLOUT: SH106 BILLION AT RISK

The scandal lands at the worst possible moment for President William Ruto’s flagship privatisation programme. The KPC initial public offering, completed in March 2026, was celebrated as a landmark success — 105 percent oversubscribed, with 70,000 ordinary Kenyans purchasing shares at Sh9 each.

Yet as Nation Africa’s analysis revealed, non-EAC foreign investors took only 0.02 percent of the shares on offer, a detail that in retrospect suggests international institutional money may have priced in governance risks that domestic retail investors were not informed about.

If those who ran KPC at the time of the IPO — including Joe Sang, who has now resigned in disgrace — are proven to have been complicit in a scheme to flood Kenya’s national fuel supply chain with substandard, adulterated product, then every investor who purchased KPC shares on the basis of governance disclosures made during the IPO roadshow faces a question that should alarm any regulatory authority: were material facts withheld?

The Sh106 billion valuation of KPC now rests on the credibility of an institution whose former management is under criminal investigation for allegedly poisoning the very product it was tasked with delivering.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT SAY

The official position, as articulated by Wandayi, is that the fuel did not enter the Kenyan market because One Petroleum confirmed it had taken steps to ensure the cargo from MT Paloma does not enter the Kenyan market.

One Petroleum’s statement, published after consultations with the government, maintained that the petroleum cargo brought in via MT Paloma would not enter the market.

What neither statement addresses is what happened between March 27, when MT Paloma discharged, and the date those commitments were made. KPC’s own structural reality, confirmed by three anonymous industry executives, is that a discharged cargo of petrol cannot be isolated once it enters the pipeline.

The physics of petroleum infrastructure are not subject to ministerial directives. The fuel mixed the moment it was discharged. The assurance that it will not enter the market is, at best, a commitment about future conduct.

It says nothing about what has already flowed out of Mombasa’s Kipevu depot and through the pipeline to Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, and Kisumu, where oil marketers were already lifting volumes and paying KRA taxes on cargo they had booked before Wandayi issued his instruction.

Kenya Insights has established that Wandayi and KPC remained tight-lipped on the full fate of the fuel even as the Business Daily reported industry fears that part of the consignment could have already flowed to motorists’ tanks.

In a country where motor vehicle penetration continues to rise and where the informal transport sector runs almost entirely on petrol and diesel, a silent contamination of the national fuel supply is not a technical inconvenience.

It is a public health event.

The government’s silence on exactly how much of the One Petroleum cargo was already distributed before the withdrawal order was issued is not just a communications failure. It is an accountability failure of the highest order.

CONCLUSION: THE BELL CANNOT BE UNRUNG

One Petroleum’s public statement of compliance with Wandayi’s withdrawal directive achieved exactly what it was designed to achieve: it shifted public attention from the irreversible to the procedural.

By issuing a statement of compliance, the company converted a question about what had already happened into a question about what it would do next. The government, desperate for a political resolution ahead of the April 14 EPRA price review cycle — when pump prices are expected to rise by as much as Sh53 per litre — accepted that framing.

But the pipeline industry’s physical reality does not accommodate political framing. The Kenya Pipeline Company is a flow system. It does not hold cargo in named containers.

It does not reserve capacity per importer.

It does not have a mechanism to reverse the discharge of 68,000 tonnes of substandard petrol once that petrol has been blended with the national supply stream.

Three industry executives said so, on the record within their anonymity, to Kenya Insights and Business Daily. The DCI knows it. The oil marketing companies know it. The motorists who filled their tanks over Easter weekend did not know it — and they were given no opportunity to find out.

The most important question in this scandal is not whether One Petroleum complied with the withdrawal order.

It is whether any Kenyan filling a tank at a petrol station between March 27 and the date of that order was protected by the regulatory system that their taxes fund.

The answer, based on everything Kenya Insights has established, is that they were not. And the government, as of this writing, has offered them nothing except silence.