The long-running disagreement between Tatu City and senior Kiambu County officials became public when the developers openly accused Governor Kimani Wamatangi and Lands CEC Salome Wainaina of using the master-plan approval process to pressure them for free land.
Tatu City is a large mixed-use special economic zone on the outskirts of Nairobi that has attracted foreign investors from countries including New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Norway.
Company officials said they had been waiting more than a year and a half for the county to issue a simple no-objection letter needed for the national director of physical planning to approve their revised master plan.
During that time, they claimed, the governor and the lands executive kept insisting that Tatu City must surrender more than forty acres of land without payment.
They valued the demanded land at about 4.3 billion shillings and noted that the list of requirements even included a portion set aside for the governor’s official residence.
At a press briefing held in July 2024, Tatu City’s country head Preston Mendenhall presented a letter written by Salome Wainaina on official county letterhead and dated 16 April 2024.
The letter was titled “Pending Issues” and clearly listed the surrender of land as one of the conditions that had to be met before the county would clear the way for approval.
Mendenhall and other company representatives said the governor himself had taken part in meetings where the same demand was repeated. They argued that Kenyan law does not allow a county government to force a private developer to give away land free of charge.
If the county genuinely needed land for public facilities such as schools, hospitals or recreation areas, they said, the proper route was compulsory acquisition with fair market compensation paid to the owner.
Tatu City maintained that its revised master plan already set aside 103 acres for public-purpose use and that this was in line with both Kenyan planning standards and international practice.
The company went further and estimated that the prolonged delay had already cost the county and the country more than 16 billion shillings in postponed investment and had blocked the creation of roughly 4,500 jobs that would have gone mainly to young people.
They described the situation as damaging to Kenya’s reputation as a place that welcomes foreign direct investment.Governor Wamatangi strongly denied any attempt at extortion.
He said the county was simply applying the Physical and Land Use Planning Act, which requires developers of large projects to allocate land for public utilities. He pointed out that the original master plan approved years earlier had earmarked a much larger area around 406 acres for public use, and he argued that the new proposal had reduced that share too far. The two acres mentioned for a governor’s residence, he insisted, would remain public property belonging to the county government and not a private home.
Wamatangi also claimed that Tatu City had never surrendered any land to the county since the project began more than a decade earlier, despite legal expectations.
Both sides later wrote to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission asking for investigations. Wamatangi and Wainaina also filed defamation suits against Tatu City and its officials, saying the public accusations had unfairly damaged their names and careers.
The dispute showed how planning rules, private investment and political authority can collide. More than a year after the public exchange of claims, the core questions of land surrender and master-plan approval remained unsettled, with each side continuing to stand by its version of events.
