Adil Arshed Khawaja does not need a ministry, a party post, or a name on a tender document. He has something more useful. He has the chair of Safaricom, the managing partnership of the oldest law firm in the country, a thirty-year friendship with the President, and a habit of appearing, through clients, staff, or companies in his orbit, wherever the state is about to hand private actors a toll on a public service.
That is the method. Not a bribe in an envelope. A structure.
On 22 December 2022, barely a hundred days after William Ruto was sworn in, Safaricom appointed Khawaja a director. John Ngumi, the chairman associated with the previous administration, resigned the same day. By 27 January 2023 the board had elected Khawaja chairman of East Africa’s most profitable company, the firm that runs M-Pesa and sits on the phone records, mobile-money rails, and location data of tens of millions of Kenyans. The company announcement listed him as managing partner of Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews, a former chairman of KCB Bank Kenya, a former director of Kenya Power, a director of CMC Motors, and a recipient of the Moran of the Order of the Burning Spear. The political reading in Nairobi was blunter. The Uhuru-era chair had been cleared out, and a man the President has called a friend of more than thirty years had been put at the head of the one private company the state cannot function without.
Khawaja has been careful with the label. He told the Nation he is not the President’s personal lawyer. “President William Ruto is my close friend for more than 30 years. Our friendship goes way back between our families.” He has also been described, including in the Nation’s own framing, as Ruto’s Mr Fix It, and he has not hidden the proximity. He has travelled with the President. His firm employs the President’s son, Nick Ruto. Asked about that hire, Khawaja said he did not know Nick had applied, that the firm receives thousands of applications, and that the young lawyer was selected on merit. The explanation may be true. It does not change the picture. The managing partner who chairs Safaricom also runs the office where the Head of State’s son draws a salary, while that same office acts for clients chasing the state’s largest contracts.
The health contract is where the picture stops being abstract.
In September 2024 the Ministry of Health awarded an Integrated Healthcare Information Technology System to a consortium that Safaricom leads on paper and does not control in equity. Apeiro Limited took 59.55 percent. Safaricom took 22.56 percent. Konvergenz Network Solutions took 17.89 percent. The consortium is to put in Sh104.8 billion over ten years and recover it in monthly payments from the public health system that replaced the National Hospital Insurance Fund. Ordinary Kenyans met the new system as crashed portals, rejected claims, and patients turned away at hospital gates. The men who assembled the consortium met it as a ten-year annuity.
Apeiro sits inside Sirius International Holding, itself inside Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company, the structure reporters traced when they went looking for the Adani link in the health plan. Khawaja’s answer on his own firm was narrow. “We gave some preliminary advice to Konvergenz. They are a big technology firm that has done many successful large projects. This project was started by former President Uhuru Kenyatta and it is only now that we are seeing its implementation.” The project may well have been conceived earlier. Implementation, the consortium, and his chairmanship arrived together. Safaricom’s own lawyers on the deal were Kaplan & Stratton. Apeiro used Anjarwalla & Khanna. Konvergenz used Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews. The chairman of the listed company in the consortium is the managing partner of the firm advising another member of the same consortium.
Then the share register got interesting.
Commtech Consortium Limited was incorporated in March 2023, weeks after Khawaja took the Safaricom chair. Its first shareholders were not engineers and not Gulf investors. They were Deborah Linet Ontiri and Peter Okaalet Jr, lawyers at Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews, the firm Khawaja leads. Commtech then appeared with a 22.5 percent stake inside Konvergenz, the same Konvergenz sitting in the Sh104.8 billion health consortium, the same Konvergenz Khawaja says his firm advised. Business Registration Service filings later show that 22.5 percent moving to Starway Trading Limited, a Ras Al Khaimah company, in a jurisdiction where beneficial owners disappear behind a local agent. Commtech itself changed hands. The register now shows Dadson Wahagi Mugo with 80 percent and Elvis Charo Kitsao, once a director with no shares, with 20 percent.
And Commtech did not stay in health. It emerged holding 25 percent of Milestone Games Limited, the company that operates SportPesa. Techglow Limited, another Ras Al Khaimah shell with no public office and no public face, holds 54 percent. The Kenyans who built the brand were diluted to the margins. Robert Macharia, once the majority owner, is down to about 0.75 percent. Ronald Karauri, the public face of SportPesa, is down to roughly 3 percent. Milestone booked Sh330.5 billion in stakes in the year to June 2026. The betting excise alone has become a KRA success story. The same lightly staffed vehicle that once sat inside a state health contract now sits on a quarter of the country’s dominant bookmaker, while Safaricom’s M-Pesa rails remain the pipe through which that money moves.
Khawaja has never said whether Ontiri and Okaalet were investing their own money or holding shares for someone else. He has never said whether his firm’s advice to Konvergenz reached the vehicle his own lawyers owned. A law firm advising a contractor is ordinary. A law firm whose lawyers are the opening names on a company inside that contractor, which then migrates into a betting operator processing hundreds of billions of shillings, is a question the Capital Markets Authority and the Law Society have not asked in public.
The Adani chapter ran on the same rails.
Dentons Hamilton Harrison & Mathews acted for the Adani Group in the court fights over the proposed thirty-year lease of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and the Adani Energy deal to build and run Ketraco transmission lines, the airport proposal priced in the region of Sh258 billion to Sh290 billion, the power lines at about Sh95.7 billion. Both were single-sourced public-private partnerships. Both collapsed after public revolt, court petitions by the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Law Society of Kenya, and the US indictment of Gautam Adani. Khawaja did not pretend to be a stranger to the transactions. He defended them as development. His firm was in the papers. His chairmanship of Safaricom put him, at the same moment, at the head of a consortium whose largest member reporters had already tied to the Abu Dhabi holding web associated with Adani’s Kenya push. When the airport deal died, the health contract did not.
Healthcare outside the consortium tells the same story in a quieter register. Khawaja is a director of NMC Fertility Kenya, a company sitting in the Jayesh Saini medical network that also includes Bliss Healthcare and Nairobi West Hospital. Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, after his impeachment, named Khawaja and Saini as the pair who spent hours at State House cutting deals while elected officials, including Gachagua himself, waited. He called State House the centre of corruption in the country. That is an allegation by a fallen rival, not a charge, and neither man has been convicted of it. It is also the only on-the-record description, from a man who was in the building, of how access worked. No independent inquiry has tested it. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has shown no appetite to.
On Khawaja’s watch the company he chairs has also been told, in open court, what its power looks like to a Kenyan who tried to sell it an idea. On 8 May 2026 Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mong’are, in Commercial Case E407 of 2022, found that Safaricom infringed the copyright of Peter Nthei Muoki and Beluga Limited in the M-Teen Mobile Wallet USSD sequence, the parent-child wallet that the company launched as M-Pesa Go and Manage Child Account. She awarded Sh1,400,067,000 in general damages and an ongoing royalty of 0.5 percent of gross M-Pesa revenue for as long as the feature or anything substantially like it remains live. She rejected Safaricom’s account of a Central Bank verbal request and a Huawei proposal for want of documents, and drew an adverse inference. Safaricom obtained a stay and has appealed. The judgment stands as the High Court’s finding until that appeal is decided. It describes a company that took a local developer’s registered expression, shipped the product, and could not produce the paper trail for its own origin story. The chairman did not write the code. He presides over the board that answers for the culture.
The state’s own shares in that company have travelled the same fog. In June 2026 the government sold 15 percent of Safaricom to Vodacom at Sh34 a share, Sh204.3 billion, and took a further Sh40.2 billion as an advance on dividends, cutting the public stake from 35 percent to 20 and lifting Vodacom to about 55 percent. On 15 September 2026 a three-judge bench of Justices Francis Gikonyo, Roselyne Aburili and Tabitha Ouya nullified the sale, quashed Sessional Paper No. 3 of 2025, and ordered the shares restored, finding the divestment unconstitutional and in breach of merger rules. The state and Vodacom are appealing. Khawaja did not sign the Treasury’s sessional paper. He chaired the company while control of the national payments utility was being moved, in a deal the High Court has since called void.
None of this is a secret biography. It is in company announcements, in Business Registration Service filings, in a Nation interview, in a High Court judgment, and in the consortium percentages the Ministry of Health did not bother to hide. The secrecy is in the beneficial owners behind Ras Al Khaimah letterheads, and in the question Khawaja has never answered: when his lawyers appeared on Commtech, whose money was it?
The public face is Rhino Charge, Rhino Ark, conservation trusts, a state honour, and the manners of Senior Counsel. The working face is the tollgate. A listed monopoly. A law firm that advises the counterparty. A vehicle in the firm’s own names inside the contract. A migration of that vehicle into the betting company. A directorship in the private hospital network feeding on the same health budget. A President’s son on the payroll. A friend of thirty years on the Hill.
Kenyans fund all of it. They fund it in SHA deductions that do not open a hospital door. They fund it in M-Pesa fees. They fund it in the excise on a bet placed on a phone Safaricom connects, into a bookmaker a quarter-owned by a company born in his firm’s corridor. Adil Khawaja has not been charged. He has been placed, repeatedly, where the contract is signed, and he has called the placement friendship. The filings call it something else.
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