A seven-day ultimatum in a lawyer’s letter from Kitui has run out. A Nairobi City County Assembly officer now sits at the centre of a village storm over a 19-year-old Kabarak University student his father says she took from campus and kept in Donholm.
The letter is dated 2 October 2026. Michael M. Nguma of Mwendwa Mwinzi & Associates Advocates wrote it on the instructions of Harrison Mumo Simon. It names his son, Ian Mutinda Mumo, and is addressed to Monicah M. Muthami, care of the Office of the Clerk at City Hall.
Online, and in the first write-ups of the row, she is described as the Assembly’s deputy or assistant clerk. In a 2019 employment case she swore an affidavit as Principal Clerk Assistant heading legislative and procedural services at the same Assembly. She has not, on the public record, answered the new claims.
Simon’s lawyers say the boy was admitted to Kabarak University in September 2025 for a Bachelor of Commerce, and that the fees were paid. They say they attached an admission letter dated 7 August 2025, a student identification card and a fee statement.
The family account circulating with the letter is blunter. Relatives say they sold their only piece of land to raise about KSh300,000, paid the university in full, and put the teenager on the road to Nakuru.
Shortly after he reported, the letter alleges, Muthami took him to her residence at Donholm Estate. The advocates say she has kept him there in an inappropriate romantic relationship. The result, they write, is that he has abandoned the degree the family paid for, “seriously jeopardising his education and future.”
The demand is absolute. She is told to stop the relationship, stop interfering with his studies, and stop hosting him. She was given seven days from 2 October to put that promise in writing.
Fail, and the firm said it had instructions to sue. It also warned it would place the file before her employer, the Nairobi City County Assembly, as conduct “immoral, unethical and unbecoming” of the public service. That window closed on 9 October. No written undertaking has surfaced.
What makes the letter unusual is the law it reaches for. Ian is 19. He is an adult. The advocates nonetheless cite Article 43 of the Constitution on the right to education, Article 53 on the protection of children, and Section 35 of the Children Act, 2022.
That section allows a court to extend parental responsibility past the eighteenth birthday where special circumstances exist. Simon, the lawyers say, is weighing whether to ask a court to treat his son’s exit from Kabarak, and Muthami’s alleged role in it, as one of those circumstances.
Critics of the letter have already called that a dead end. Consenting adults, they argue, are beyond a parent’s writ. A lawyer’s fee will not drag a grown man back to a lecture hall. The family is betting the court will see a boy whose fees were paid and whose future was steered off campus.
The quarrel has not stayed in the advocate’s tray. Posts that carried the letter say the two are from the same village in Kitui, and that wazee, pastors and the area chief have been pulled in. A social media profile shared alongside the correspondence lists Kitui as home.
In the villages, a 38-year gap and a City Hall job against a first-year place at Kabarak read less like a private affair and more like a theft of the only ladder a household had. The land is gone. The fees, the family says, are gone with it. The student is in Donholm.
Muthami has not been quoted. The Assembly has not said whether the letter reached the Clerk, or whether any complaint has been logged against an officer. Kabarak has not confirmed whether Ian Mutinda Mumo is still on the roll.
Until one of those institutions speaks, the only document on the table is a father’s demand. He wants a senior clerk at City Hall to release his son from her house and send him back to the degree a parcel of Kitui soil was sold to buy.
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