At around 3 a.m. on 12 October 2026, more than 200 men carrying crude weapons stormed the Muiruri-Gachoka family home on Thika Municipality Block 8/264 (formerly LR No. 7705/2), a coffee farm the family has occupied for decades. Phones were seized. Furniture and electronics were damaged.
Former radio presenter Ciku Muiruri was beaten, left with a black eye and head injuries after being struck with a crowbar; she has said she feared sexual assault.
The family’s 80-year-old matriarch, Margaret Njeri Muiruri, and other relatives were driven from the house and have since lived in a tent on the land while the group remains on the property. Construction has continued among the coffee bushes. Under-age children were also assaulted, according to family accounts.
Ciku Muiruri has named Abdirashid Abdul Sharifow, a director of Floriculture International Limited, and Lucas Kaguamba (linked to Ngoigwa ThikaView) among those involved in the operation.
Her brother, activist and journalist Tony Gachoka, has described the raid as the work of a high-net-worth Somali figure openly backed by elements of the state and represented by Senior Counsel Nelson Havi. No arrests for the assault have been reported.
The paper trail begins in 1993, when the land was charged to Trust Bank and Trust Finance to secure loans of Sh15 million and Sh30 million advanced to Katka Islands Limited. After default, the lenders exercised a statutory power of sale.
In May 1995 the property was transferred to Floriculture International Limited. Court records name Satishchandra Venilal Naker as a director of the acquiring company. Justice Francis Tuiyott’s judgment of 14 February 2020 in Nairobi HCCC No. 3590 of 1995 dismissed Central Kenya Limited’s challenge to the charges, the sale and the transfer.
The judgment did not order eviction. An appeal remains pending in the Court of Appeal. The family has long maintained that the sale was irregular, the price a fraction of the true value, and documents manipulated.
In 2026 Floriculture turned to the Business Premises Rent Tribunal. An earlier reference was dismissed by the tribunal chairman, who ruled that the company had deceived the forum by treating a residential bedroom in an elderly woman’s house on a coffee farm as business premises.
He ordered Floriculture to pay costs. Within days the company filed afresh. On 5 October 2026 a different member issued ex-parte orders directing certain family members, including Peter Mwangi and Charity Wanjiku Muiruri, to give vacant possession. Days later the pre-dawn raid occurred.
The company, through letters signed by Sharifow, has written to Inspector-General Douglas Kanja and Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen accusing Thika West Deputy County Commissioner James Muiruri Wanyoike, Sub-County Police Commander John Kimanthi and Sub-County Criminal Investigations Officer Jacinta Ndavi of obstructing enforcement of court orders and of having a personal interest in the land.
It has demanded investigations and recusal. Havi has publicly stated that Floriculture is the rightful owner, has taken possession as entitled in law, and is fencing the property, while accusing the family of using compliant officers and elected leaders to resist and of seeking public sympathy after failing.
On 28 October 2026 the Kiambu County Security and Intelligence Committee and Thika West Sub-County committee met. Deputy County Commissioner J. M. Wanyoike issued summons under reference CORR 3/3 VOL.II/108 ordering Margaret Njeri Muiruri, Jayne Wangui Gachoka, Peter Gicheru Muiruri, Margaret Muthoni Wangari, Pius Njuguna Gachoka and Abdirashid Abdul Sharifow to appear the next morning at 11 a.m. so that the committee’s decision could be communicated. Sharifow refused.
Through a protest letter the same day he claimed the DCC had a conflict of interest and that the security committee lacked authority over land ownership or enforcement of court orders. The summons disclosed neither the decision nor the grounds for it.
Sharifow’s own record shows a pattern of contested titles. In 2021 he appeared in a Milimani court as Abdirashid Abdul Sharifow alias Zainulabidin Sharif, charged with procuring registration of a title by false pretences in connection with prime land in Nairobi’s South C.
He denied the charges. He has been a defendant in Environment and Land Court cases in Nairobi in which he sought to be struck out as a party over a plot, only for the court to note that he had signed an agreement admitting ownership. He has also been involved in proceedings concerning alleged irregular lease processing for land in Kwale.
The method has remained consistent across the decades. First secure a paper title through a statutory sale whose regularity the original owners still contest. Then treat residential occupation as a tenancy that can be terminated in a specialised tribunal.
When the tribunal’s own chairman rules that the company deceived the forum, file again and obtain a second set of orders. Then enforce through numbers in the early hours while complaining, through formal letters signed by a director, that public officers are obstructing justice.
When the security committee summons both the historical claimants and the contemporary director to the same room, decline to appear and instead write further letters to the highest levels of the Interior ministry and police.
Satish Naker’s name sits on the 1995 acquisition in the court record. Abdirashid Abdul Sharifow’s name sits on the 2026 letters to the Inspector-General, on the family’s identification of those present during the raid, and on the summons he chose not to honour.
The eighty-year-old matriarch lives in a tent on the land her family once called home. The appeal against the 2020 judgment remains undecided. The paper title and the crowbar have never been further apart, or more clearly connected through the two men who have driven the claim from the 1990s to the present.
Ordinary Kenyans watching the same pattern of layered occupation, administrative obstruction and selective enforcement of court orders are left to ask how many other family farms will be converted into the same machine while the security apparatus and the courts debate procedure.
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