Nelson Amenya, just shy of 31, shifts uneasily when asked about his next move after completing his MBA in France. Early last year, he blew the whistle on a $2 billion, 30-year deal—exposing, through leaked documents, how President William Ruto’s allies were quietly handing over Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, East Africa’s busiest hub, to India’s Adani Group in a murky backroom arrangement. The contract guaranteed profits, bypassed public participation, and shifted the burden to Kenyan taxpayers if revenues dipped.
Once certain he’d return to Kenya—the country he adores for its sunshine, vibrant friendships, and resilient people—Amenya now hesitates. “I won’t go back. Not yet,” he says flatly. “I tore meat from the beast’s mouth—they’ll kill me. I have until September to decide where to go, but Kenya? Not now, my brother. My inbox is full of threats, friends are calling to tell me not to return. I don’t want to end up like that NHIF lady—gunned down in the middle of Nairobi for speaking out, and nothing’s been done.”
The whistle blowing timing was explosive. Just as Amenya’s exposé hit, U.S. authorities slapped Adani founder Gautam Adani with a $250 million bribery charge, intensifying global scrutiny. Under mounting pressure, Ruto’s government cancelled the controversial “Build, Operate, and Transfer” deal with the Indian conglomerate, which has interests spanning Israel, Tanzania, Australia, and the UAE. “I got the alert mid-lecture,” Amenya recalls. “I posted the leak immediately—Kenyans cheered me on online. I cried. One of my professors in Paris saw me break down. He follows me on X now.”
First case against Jayesh Saini won
But the backlash was swift and brutal. Pro-Adani accounts on X smeared him as a racist, a thief, a Western puppet—some even sent death threats. The real blow came when billionaire tycoon Jayesh Saini sued him for defamation, accusing Amenya of linking him to dodgy health contracts and painting him as Adani’s fixer in Kenya’s elite circles. He demanded a €50,000 ‘defamation’ bill, plus €10,000 for his slick lawyers.
Kenyans on X, famously ferocious, rallied. They called him shujaa (warrior) and crowdfunded his legal defense. The Kenya Human Rights Commission also stepped in. “I truly panicked to the core. The legal opinion on my case gave me only a 50 percent chance of winning—and if I lost, I risked being jailed or deported back to Kenya, where I’d be at the mercy of the powerful figures I had exposed,” he tells AfriqueXXI. “Even my attorney’s expression didn’t inspire much confidence.”
Against the odds, the lawyer flipped the case. Amenya not only won but was awarded damages. “They haven’t paid a cent yet—I’m still chasing them across Europe, India, or Nairobi. But that verdict was everything.”
“I’m not naïve enough to return home”
He argued that his social media posts about the tycoon were in the public interest—exposing grand corruption in Kenya, a country where graft is deeply entrenched. He maintained that Saini, a businessman benefiting from public tenders, deserved scrutiny—especially since Senate reports and media investigations backed his claims. In Kenya, he noted, corruption rarely ruins reputations; it often cements them. He called the lawsuit a classic SLAPP—strategic litigation to silence critics.
“But I’m not naïve enough to return home—not when my business is under a suspicious investigation and police have raided my parents’ house. It’s me they’re after,” he says of Kenya, where he now prefers to speak from exile. His caution mirrors findings from the 2023 Ethics and Anti-Corruption Survey, which revealed that 57.3% of Kenyans believe corruption is rampant, and 86% fear reporting it due to harassment, retaliation, or victimization.
This, despite Kenya’s proud constitutional guarantees—Articles 31, 33, and 34, which uphold free expression and media freedom—and the 2006 law meant to protect whistleblowers and witnesses. Churchill Suba, a veteran civil rights advocate and now Executive Director of the Kenya National Civil Society Centre, says Kenya’s much-celebrated 2010 Constitution—hailed as one of the most progressive in the region—offers little real protection for whistleblowers.
“A small fish in a pond where even the big ones shudder”
“Theoretically, the constitution safeguards whistleblowers. But in practice, it’s a different story,” Suba told AfriqueXXI. “Most whistleblowers end up targeted by the very institutions meant to shield them. And because they often expose those in power, the blowback is swift and brutal.”
He urges Amenya to remain in exile in France, describing him as “a small fish in a pond where even the big ones shudder.” Suba points to the case of Dr. Roselyne Akombe, a former commissioner of Kenya’s electoral body, who fled the country after raising concerns about the credibility of the 2017 elections. “It’s never safe once you blow the whistle,” he says. “Even commissioners had to run.”
Akombe didn’t flee openly. She had boarded a flight to Dubai under the guise of inspecting ballot printing, but never returned. Instead, she resurfaced in New York, where she resigned and revealed that even the electoral commission’s chairperson feared for his life.
Presidential aspirant Professor George Wajackoyah, once a police officer in the investigations department, fled Kenya in the 1990s after colleagues linked to the Robert Ouko murder probe began disappearing—he feared he’d be next. Wajackoyah was following leads that could expose those behind the brutal killing of the then–Foreign Affairs Minister. Though he returned in 2010, a promised book detailing the high-profile murder and his narrow escape remains unpublished—whether due to fear or other reasons, no one knows.
63 deaths and 74 enforced disappearances in 2024
Then there’s John Githongo, former Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics under President Mwai Kibaki. He fled to the UK after blowing the whistle on the infamous Anglo Leasing scandal—a multi-billion-shilling scam involving fraudulent security contracts that cast a shadow over top government officials, including during former President Uhuru Kenyatta’s time in office.
A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable dated September 16, 2009—published by WikiLeaks—underscored the danger he faced. The cable stated:
Paragraph 5 provides details of statements made by Ringera (former head of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission) to Githongo that Githongo took as direct threats to his life by the Kenyan political elite, to include Ringera. This TD corroborates Githongo’s conclusion about Ringera who is identified in a room with leading Kikuyu politicians, including Ministers of government, plotting to kill Githongo in 2009. The conclusion one can draw from this report, combined with Githongo’s testimony, is that Ringera is part of those within the Kenyan political elite seeking to suppress information and those with information that could assist in punishing and minimizing corruption in Kenya.
Githongo’s case remains one of the starkest examples of the risks faced by snitches in Kenya—where exposing the truth can mean fleeing for your life. And the list of exiled whistleblowers keeps growing.
On April 14, 2025, Kenya’s civil society issued a blistering State of the Nation address condemning widespread state abuses: 63 protest deaths, 74 enforced disappearances, and 1,376 arbitrary arrests (KNCHR, 2024). The statement also flagged police violence, cross-border abductions like that of Ugandan activist Kizza Besigye, and crackdowns on journalists and students.
“I became a statistic of state torture”
Yet exposers barely got a mention. Their plight was tucked into a line about the stalled Whistleblower Protection Bill—a footnote in a document otherwise dominated by headlines on femicide, education collapse, and a crumbling health system. Was this an oversight or a sign that snitches have slipped off the civil society radar? “That was not intentional,” Suba admits. “We take the challenge seriously and commit to championing whistleblower protections more strongly moving forward as many are fleeing for their life.”
But not all truth tellers step out of the country. Wachira Waheire, an activist in his early 60s who has battled government excesses since his university days, warns that many victims of state crackdowns mistakenly believe they are safe. “When I was about 25, plainclothes police arrested me at the airport on trumped-up charges. I was jailed from 1986 to 1989, falsely accused of belonging to the outlawed Mwakenya party and holding a poster claiming hunger would spark a revolt,” says Waheire, a renowned torture survivor who now runs Citizens for Justice, an association for torture victims in Kenya. Tortured at Nairobi’s Nyayo House, he endured half-lit underground cells, some flooded, with frequent food deprivation.
In 2010, after the Moi regime’s fall, he was awarded KSh 2.5 million for unlawful arrest and prosecution. “During our university days while we were speaking against state excesses, I received asylum offers but stayed for love of country and family. Some friends fled to safer nations while I became a statistic of state torture,” Waheire reflects.
As in Ethiopia, the law does not always protect
In Kenya, efforts to pass a Whistleblower Protection Bill have dragged on for over a decade, with agencies like EACC and Transparency International pushing for change. Recently, Kitui Woman Representative Irene Kasalu revived her 2023 Whistleblower Bill, which had collapsed in the previous Parliament. She says her persistence in the 13th Parliament is driven by the need to empower citizens to speak out against graft—with the promise of financial rewards—and to help journalists pursue investigative stories without constantly watching their backs.
Just a couple of African countries—Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda—have stand-alone whistleblower protection laws. Among them, Botswana’s Whistleblower Act of 2016 stands out as a gold standard. It has helped curb corruption in what is now Africa’s second least corrupt nation after Seychelles (Transparency International, 2024). The law allows whistleblowers to report misconduct anonymously through secure hotlines and digital platforms while shielding them from reprisals such as dismissal or harassment. But that is no guarantee for the safety of informants in the said countries. Ethiopia’s Proclamation to Provide for the Protection of Witnesses and Whistleblowers of Criminal Offences, for instance, fails to protect whistleblowers like Abdullahi Hussein, who fled in 2018 after filming state atrocities, facing death threats without legal recourse. Its narrow focus on witnesses in criminal cases excludes workplace whistleblowers from retaliation protections, offering no reinstatement or compensation. Journalists, like Zone 9 bloggers jailed in 2014, face harassment under privacy and anti-terrorism laws, with 60 fleeing since 2010. Unlike Botswana’s 2016 Whistleblower Act, Ethiopia’s law lacks anonymity and robust safeguards, leaving truth-tellers vulnerable in a repressive environment.
“They haven’t unleashed all the dogs on you yet”
Kenya, on the other hand, relies on the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act of 2003, to shield exposers placing it among just 21 African nations with legislation that only indirectly protects whistleblowers. The majority of African countries, according to iSpeak Africa—a leading pan-African watchdog on governance—still leave leakers dangerously exposed.
In contrast, Europe, where Amenya now lives, and the U.S., offer far stronger protections. America’s False Claims Act (FCA) allows individuals to sue on the government’s behalf in fraud cases and receive 15–30% of any recovered funds—resulting in billions reclaimed. For financial crimes, the Dodd-Frank Act enables anonymous reporting of securities violations and foreign bribery, with whistleblowers eligible for 10–30% of penalties above $1 million. Importantly, the law protects them from retaliation by employers.
Yet even in the U.S., whistleblowers face real danger. Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who exposed mass surveillance, remains in exile in Russia—hailed by some as a hero, condemned by others as a traitor. His colleague, Reality Winner, wasn’t so lucky—she was sentenced to 63 months in prison in 2017 for leaking a classified document. More recently, in March 2024, Boeing whistleblower John Barnett was found dead under suspicious circumstances while testifying about defective aircraft parts. Police ruled it a suicide, but the timing raised serious concerns.
In late March, Amenya says a French police officer quietly warned him: “They haven’t unleashed all the dogs on you yet.” Still, he says, he feels safer in France than in Kenya.
Recently named one of Africa’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024 by New African Business Magazine, Amenya knows the storm isn’t over he won’t return while Ruto’s regime rules. “Plan ahead, stay out of Africa,” he warns whistleblowers. For now, he misses nyama choma (roast meat)—but not enough to be the roast meat.
