Charles Korgoren Kerich did not walk back into Nairobi City Hall on Tuesday so much as he was carried back in on the shoulders of a governor who, for the second time in five years, has decided that a man convicted of defying a court order is precisely the man he needs running one of the most consequential infrastructure programmes in Kenya’s history.
Barely a week after the High Court set aside a three-month committal warrant that should have sent him to Industrial Area Prison, Kerich sat through Governor Johnson Sakaja’s 90th County Executive Committee meeting as though the last two months of vanishing acts, fugitive-from-justice warnings and a Dubai-flight scandal had never happened.
Multiple sources who attended the closed session told Kenya Insights he has been quietly handed the Mobility and Works docket the office now responsible for delivering Phase One of the Nairobi Metropolitan Rapid Transit System (NMRTS), a project the county has priced above Sh1 trillion.
No public statement. No gazette notice read out to residents. Just a seat at the table, restored as if by default.
A debt City Hall chose to ignore until a man went to jail for it
The legal fiction that finally caught up with Kerich traces back to a decree dated June 29, 2023, in favour of Foton East Africa Limited, out of which Nairobi County was ordered to pay Kwengu & Company Advocates Sh106,736,841.83 in legal fees. The county sat on a Certificate of Order Against the Government issued in November 2024 and simply did not pay. When the law firm went back to court to enforce it, it was not the county that faced the music it was Kerich personally, in his capacity as the executive charged with releasing county funds.
On May 19, 2026, Justice Francis Gikonyo found him guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to three months’ imprisonment without the option of a fine. Kerich did not surrender.
Weeks passed. The court, unimpressed, revisited the matter on July 7 and delivered a blunt rejection of his fourth attempt to suspend the sentence, telling him in essence to present himself to the relevant authority or be arrested. “I decline to set aside or suspend the sentence imposed by this court,” the judge ruled.
“I am reliably informed… that the flight of the 1st Contemnor out of the jurisdiction was procured, sanctioned, and actively facilitated by Governor Sakaja.”
That line belongs to advocate Appel Kwengu, in a sworn affidavit filed at the Milimani High Court on May 30 seeking to have Sakaja himself cited for contempt and committed to civil jail.
The petition alleges the governor authorised Kerich to travel ostensibly on official county business to place him beyond the reach of the committal warrant, at a moment when City Hall was publicly insisting Kerich was in the United States on official duty, even as his own lawyers separately told the court he was there receiving medical treatment.
Two different explanations for the same absence, offered by the same administration, is the kind of detail that tends to raise more questions than it answers.
Kenya Insights notes these remain allegations before the court and have not been adjudicated; Sakaja has not been convicted of anything in relation to them.
The Sh30 million question
When Kerich finally reappeared before Justice Gikonyo on July 16, his lawyers announced a consent: an immediate personal payment of Sh30 million to the law firm, with the balance to follow on a schedule tabled in court.
The judge, satisfied with what he described as demonstrated remorse, lifted the committal order. Kerich has told the court he intends to seek reimbursement from the county once the matter is fully resolved meaning the Sh30 million he produced to keep himself out of a prison cell may, in the end, be paid back to him from public coffers he once controlled.
It is worth sitting with that sequence: a debt the county refused to pay for the better part of two years suddenly gets settled, in cash, by the one official who was about to go to jail over it and he expects taxpayers to make him whole afterward.
Whether that reimbursement claim succeeds is a question Nairobi residents and their MCAs would do well to track closely, given how much of this saga has already unfolded without public explanation.
Nine lives at City Hall
This is not new territory for Kerich. A former Editor-in-Chief at Radio Africa Group who crossed from newsroom to City Hall in 2017, he built a reputation under Governor Mike Sonko as “Mr Fix It” a journalist-turned-technocrat who cycled through four separate dockets (ICT, Lands and Urban Planning, Finance, and an acting stint in Health) in under a year, before Sonko elevated him to the informal rank of “super CEC” in 2019.
That same year, Sonko suspended Kerich along with fifteen other officials after a classroom collapse at Precious Talent Top School in Ngando killed eight children a tragedy the governor at the time blamed on rogue planning approvals and extortion cartels operating inside the very departments Kerich had passed through.
Kerich was reinstated to the Lands docket four months later.
During his time at Finance, Sonko’s administration also had to explain how Sh297.5 million earmarked for bursaries was instead transferred into the county’s Maryland Health Donor Fund account attributed at the time to an accounting error rather than any finding against Kerich personally, but one more episode in a finance office that residents were repeatedly asked to trust on faith.
Under Sakaja, Kerich survived a 2023 impeachment motion brought by Majority Leader Peter Imwatok over the withholding of exchequer releases due the County Assembly, kept his grip on Finance through a budget standoff that has since become a recurring feature of Nairobi governance, and now jail term erased, cash deposited, remorse noted has been moved sideways into a docket controlling a trillion-shilling transit contract rather than out of government altogether.
The company he keeps
Kerich’s rehabilitation lands in the middle of a City Hall shake-up that is itself instructive. Days before his own suspension in June, Sakaja was also forced to suspend Chief Officer for Urban Planning Patrick Analo after Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission detectives recovered roughly Sh65.3 million in cash Sh51.3 million in shillings and $113,000 stuffed, according to investigators, in the boot of his car during a raid on his Syokimau home, alongside title deeds, land sale agreements and vehicle logbooks.
The High Court has since frozen Sh16.9 million linked to Analo and his wife. Analo, on a Chief Officer’s salary capped at roughly Sh283,000 a month by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, remains under investigation.
Set side by side, the Kerich and Analo cases describe the same City Hall culture from two different angles: one official allegedly caught with unexplained cash in his car boot, the other convicted of personally obstructing the courts over money the county owed a law firm both suspended in the same fortnight, and both threaded through an administration currently mired in a budget crisis of its own making, with the County Assembly accusing the executive of stonewalling disclosure while service delivery and staff salaries hang in the balance.
What Sakaja hasn’t explained
Nairobi has now watched Charles Kerich survive a fatal building collapse, a bursary fund routed to the wrong account, an impeachment motion, a contempt conviction, an unexplained international absence during which his own governor gave the courts two conflicting cover stories, and a personally negotiated cash settlement and emerge, each time, back inside City Hall rather than out of it.
He was not cleared of wrongdoing so much as he was permitted to buy his way out of a jail sentence and quietly reassigned before the ink on the consent order had dried.
Sakaja’s office has offered no public accounting for why the man whose disappearance helped stall Nairobi’s 2026/27 budget is the same man now trusted with a mega-project the governor himself has called transformational.
That silence is itself the story: a City Hall that answers to courts only when cornered, and to residents not at all. Nairobi Insights will continue following the money on the Foton decree, on the NMRTS contracts, and on whoever ends up signing the cheques next.
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