Philip Mainga, the long-serving Managing Director of Kenya Railways Corporation, has been thrust into the middle of a new court battle that paints a picture of a coordinated operation to strip public railway materials and move them into private hands.
The Centre for Litigation Trust has filed a petition in the High Court naming Mainga, the corporation, its board, Muranga Freight Logistics Limited and Abcos Industrial Limited as respondents, claiming that scrap metal, sleepers, rails and other infrastructure components have been systematically removed from termini in Kisumu, Eldoret, Naivasha and Mombasa and delivered to a private yard in Athi River, Machakos County.
According to the court documents, the movement has relied on privately owned trucks associated with Muranga Freight Logistics. Several specific vehicles and their drivers are listed, among them KFB 065N driven by Steven Munyoki, KDC 092T driven by Ibrahim Kitavi, KDB 062N driven by Justin Nzavi, KDQ 062J driven by Cosmas Wambua, and others including KDB 823S, KZDX 040F, KBE 780G and KBC 266J.
The petition alleges that some of these consignments travelled under the watch of National Police Service officers, an arrangement the trust’s executive director Julius Ogogoh has described as a grotesque use of state force to facilitate the transfer of public property to private premises.
A breakdown near Voi on 29 September 2026 has become a focal point of the complaint. Truck registration KDX 035F/ZC2524, driven by Richard Muruiki and said to have been escorted by Corporal Hassan Aboud from Mombasa Terminus, stalled roughly four kilometres from Voi while loaded with Kenya Railways scrap metal and sleepers.
Kenya Wildlife Service rangers who intercepted the vehicle found the driver without a packing list, gate pass, auction pass or weighbridge permit. The absence of these ordinary documents has intensified questions about whether the cargo left Kenya Railways facilities under any lawful authority at all.
The Centre for Litigation Trust argues that the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act of 2015 and the Scrap Metal Act impose clear duties on public entities: materials must be inventoried, valued, declared surplus through proper channels, and disposed of through transparent competitive processes with full records of authorisation, sale agreements and payments.
Ogogoh says none of these records have been produced. Formal letters to Kenya Railways seeking the documents and a complaint lodged with the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission on 6 October 2026 have received no response.
The petition therefore seeks urgent court orders to compel production of the valuation reports, tender or auction papers, delivery notes and banking records before any further materials can be moved, sold or processed.
The fresh filing arrives while separate challenges continue to question the legal basis of Mainga’s continued occupation of the managing director’s office, with petitioners arguing that his second three-year term expired earlier in 2026.
Those cases form part of a longer record of disputes involving land allocations, procurement processes and court orders at the corporation.
The scrap-metal petition does not reopen every earlier claim, yet it frames the current movements as a direct test of whether public assets under Mainga’s authority are being managed in line with constitutional requirements of integrity, accountability and prudent use of public resources.
Neither Mainga nor the two companies named in the papers had issued a public response to the specific allegations by the time the petition was filed.
The High Court is expected to give directions shortly. For the Centre for Litigation Trust, the immediate priority is to force disclosure of the missing paper trail so that Kenyans can determine whether the railway materials were lawfully surplus and properly sold, or whether they were simply diverted through an opaque private channel.
The case now places the managing director and the corporation under fresh judicial pressure to account for the movements or face the prospect of further investigative action by anti-corruption authorities.
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