Engineer Francis Gitau is preparing to walk out of Prism Towers with his three-year contract as Director General of the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority virtually spent, yet the questions hanging over his exit are louder than any farewell speech.
Appointed by then Roads and Transport Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen on 30 October 2023, Gitau’s term expires at the end of this month. What should have been a quiet handover has instead become a scramble at the top of an agency charged with planning mass rapid transit across Nairobi, Kiambu, Kajiado, Machakos and Murang’a.
The Board, chaired by Benson Mutura and including county roads CECMs and independent members Anastacia Mumbua, Ann Robai and Eng Dominic Koskei, advertised a raft of deputy and assistant director posts in late August, with applications closing on 15 September.
Officially the exercise is about strengthening infrastructure, network management, legal services, human resources and supply chain.
Insiders tell a different story: a succession operation timed to Gitau’s departure, with favoured names already circulating and one procurement insider said to have a decisive say in who sits beside her.
At the centre of the unease is Deputy Director of Supply Chain Management Soila Shunet. NaMATA publicly dismissed circulating claims in July that she and Finance Deputy Director Brian Kiptoo used fake academic papers, insisting both hold master’s-level qualifications and are in good standing with their professional bodies.
The authority called the reports a smear by internal and external actors. Those assurances have not silenced a 29-page whistleblower complaint submitted to the Public Service Commission and later detailed by Nyakundi Report.
The document puts Gitau, Shunet and Kiptoo at the heart of alleged procurement and administrative schemes that may have cost the public more than Sh814 million between 2023 and 2026. ICT hardware and software contracts worth tens of millions are said to have been paid for without corresponding delivery.
Other claims range from unexplained wealth and high-end vehicles to absenteeism so synchronized that Shunet is described as appearing mainly when documents require a signature.
The same complaint alleges a personal relationship between the Director General and the head of procurement that would, if true, amount to a textbook conflict of interest. It also questions whether Gitau has already passed the mandatory retirement age and is angling for an irregular extension.
NaMATA has not issued a detailed public rebuttal of the September dossier. Earlier parliamentary scrutiny had already put Gitau on the defensive.
In June 2025 he appeared before the Public Investments Committee on Commercial Affairs and Energy over audit queries covering 2019/20 to 2022/23: Sh23 million in acting allowances paid beyond the six-month cap, Sh7.7 million in outstanding imprests, development spending that exceeded the approved budget by 256 percent, and hundreds of millions left unspent even as the agency received far less than it had budgeted. Gitau acknowledged shortcomings and promised tighter controls. The committee was unimpressed.
Staff who spoke on condition of anonymity say the current recruitment is being watched as a loyalty test.
One former procurement officer is said to have been pushed out after raising questions about tender awards and about the closeness between the two most powerful people in the building. Whether that officer’s account holds up in an investigation is another matter.
What is already public is that the advertised Grade 3 and Grade 4 posts sit directly beneath the departing DG and the procurement desk that has drawn the heaviest fire.
Gitau arrived with a long roads-sector résumé: former Roads Secretary, MSc in Transport Engineering and BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Nairobi, an Executive MBA from JKUAT, and training in Germany and Malaysia. For a time he was praised as a quiet reformer trying to impose order on Nairobi’s chaotic mobility.
That reputation is now competing with a paper trail of audit queries, a whistleblower file measured in hundreds of millions of shillings, and office gossip that has escaped the 32nd floor.
Retirement will not automatically close those files.
The Board, the Public Service Commission and, if the complaint gains traction, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission still have to decide whether the man leaving NaMATA left behind more than an unfinished BRT network.
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