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In 2022, Lesedi Developers, a land-selling company in Kenya catering to young middle-class home buyers, was hailed in the country’s press for its meteoric rise and the genius of its young director Geoffrey Kiragu. The Daily Nation newspaper ran a puff piece about Kiragu’s life, celebrating his rise from rags to riches. Born into a poor family living in a village in Kiambu County, amongst the expanding metropolitan sprawl of Nairobi, Kiragu’s journey to executive director had apparently begun when he subdivided his own 1-acre plot of land into four 50-by-100-feet plots and sold them off. Lesedi was born, and subsequently allowed thousands of Kenyans to deposit their savings with the company in exchange for the promise of a plot of land.
“Your premier partner for land and plots,” Lesedi offered an unlikely opportunity for aspiring Kenyans to purchase their first piece of land. Lesedi’s and similar companies’ loans to land buyers come with low deposits, long repayment periods and zero collateral other than the plot purchased. In 2022, Lesedi’s Vincent Munderu advertised a new loan product paid in instalments of 10,000 KES over 12 months before land would be handed to clients. In a country with an average income of just over 20,000 KES (150 USD), companies like Lesedi offered Kenyans the chance to pool resources and transfer savings into the prospect of secure homeownership.
The company sold thousands of plots to prospective homeowners. Kiragu won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2021. Lesedi was hailed for its perfect marriage of social responsibility and wealth-creation.
But in early 2023 reports came to light that Lesedi was not all that it seemed. The company had been selling so-called “non-existent plots.” Radio presenters on Gĩkũyũ-language morning shows called these plots “lands of lies” (mĩgunda ya maheni). Some buyers found that their land had been allocated to other people. Still others never received their freehold title deeds from the company. Whilst savers were embroiled in land contestation over their new plots, Lesedi continued to advertise. Kiragu’s eventual arrest suspended in limbo the savers who had already deposited thousands of shillings with the company, but might never receive their land.
“Invest to Nurture Your Dreams”
Lesedi’s rise and Kiragu’s fall illuminate a central engine of Kenya’s urban growth—the land-selling companies that promise Kenyans the dream of homeownership and middle class security. But across a rapidly expanding Nairobi city, a lack of government oversight and a terrain of intense speculation have rendered these aspirations precarious, liable to predation by powerful and connected elite figures who use these financial institutions for personal enrichment.
Since 2018, I have been investigating a similar case to Lesedi Developers, that of Ekeza SACCO and its sister company Gakuyo Real Estate. Because interest rates at mainstream banks are high, many Kenyans look to the “savings and credit cooperatives” (SACCOs) to finance property purchases. Ostensibly, SACCO members are united by a “common bond” with other members, and can borrow up to three times their savings underwritten by three “guarantors.” But in the context of Nairobi’s rapid urban expansion, a new type of SACCO has emerged—a version of the institution led by charismatic figures who amass large memberships through assurances of future homeownership. Ekeza came to prominence in 2017 through its CEO David Kariuki Ngari, also known as Bishop Gakuyo. Gakuyo unsuccessfully ran for the governorship of the Nairobi-adjacent metropolitan county of Kiambu in 2017 when Ekeza adverts were all over the airwaves. Over 50,000 Kenyans registered savings with Ekeza, many hoping to loan finance the purchase of plots from Gakuyo Real Estate.
But by 2018, Ekeza members had begun to realize something was amiss. Savers were forced to wait long periods of time to access their loans. Those who tried to withdraw money met constant delays. Others who had purchased land discovered that the plots had never belonged to Ekeza, or that their original owners had never been paid in full by Gakuyo. Panic grew. The government regulator stepped in to audit Ekeza, discovering that Bishop Gakuyo had siphonedoff billions of shillings to his personal accounts and those of his associates. An attempt by savers to retake control of Ekeza’s accounts was blocked in Kenya’s court system. In the meantime, members were left in limbo, and many explained to me that they had “given up” hope of receiving their savings. Some Ekeza victims believe that Gakuyo used their savings to fund his unsuccessful governor campaign in 2017. On the campaign trail of Kenya’s elections, cash handouts are an essential requirement, and runs for office require immense financial resources.
A Landscape of Suspicion
Lesedi and Ekeza are two prominent instances where land-selling companies have defrauded people attracted by the idea of growth through investment. Newspapers are warning Kenyans against the predatory practices of “off plan” investment companies. Fearing fraud, Kenyans emphasise the necessary requirements of conducting “due diligence” into purchases, especially when entering into relations with land-buying companies.
Thirty-three-year-old Munogu had saved with Ekeza throughout 2016 and 2017. Having rented in Nairobi’s Kahawa suburb, he was looking to find a permanent home with his wife and two children. He had saved 24,000 KES with Ekeza, the largest amount of money he had ever invested in a bank. “He’s a Bishop. He had a good reputation,” Munogu explained. “So I thought my money was safe.” It was only in 2018, when Ekeza was shut, that Munogu discovered Gakuyo resold land it did not own. He never managed to retrieve his savings.
The Ekeza-Gakuyo crisis had not led Munogu to abandon his aspiration to property. Instead, he embraced a new vigilance as he continued saving to purchase land for his first home. No longer would he trust companies like Gakuyo, and if he did he was intent to “certify” that any land purchased was truly under its ownership before his own purchase.Fears of double-selling encouraged Munogu to plant his metaphorical flag in his prospective plot so that he would not fall victim to the same tactics. He stressed the need to construct a building as soon as initial deposits had been paid. “A plot of land can be sold to several people at one time,” he explained to me in 2022. “So if a person finds there is a structure of any form, even fencing, it raises a red flag and so chances of the seller selling to two or more people become slim.” Such a structure didn’t need to be elaborate, simply durable. Even a latrine would do, he argued.
Kenyans describe these signs of ownership as “red flags” or “caveats” on the land that operate as warnings to others that land is already claimed. But it also illuminates the pressing need to navigate the murky waters of ownership in a landscape where land is changing hands rapidly, undermining property’s stability in the first place.
Pursuing Property in the New Kenya
After Ekeza, Munogu knew that what land-buying companies advertised was not necessarily reality. “I realised that the companies would tell you land is say 15 minutes away from a certain town,” he explained to me in 2022, “But what they fail to tell you is the means of going there—maybe it’s a rough road.”
Land-buying companies are coming under increasing scrutiny. And yet the hagiography of Lesedi’s Kiragu speaks to the way land purchases are increasingly mediated in Nairobi’s construction boom—by celebrity-level brokers, charismatic individuals who appear to have domesticated the market and in whom one can place trust. Like the figure of Gakuyo, Lesedi was built upon Kiragu’s reputation.
The lack of trust that permeates these frontiers fuels the turn towards such promising business minds, men in fine suits, hailed as geniuses. They instil confidence in prospective buyers who are themselves in the position not only of investors for speculation, but as speculators through and through, hoping that these figures are able to navigate the market and deliver the homeownership they offer. With the Kenyan government providing only limited regulation of the SACCO sector, a sector growing rapidly, too often they are revealed as the cargo cults of Nairobi’s urban frontier.
What does such chicanery reveal about Kenya’s political economy? Land fraud can be understood as an instance of “accumulation of dispossession,” ingrained in the logic of capitalist expansion described by David Harvey. But it also points towards the precarity of middle-class aspirations in central Kenya under conditions of “spectacular speculation.”Hadas Weiss has argued convincingly that middle-class investments in property are undermined by the very financialised terms of capitalism which undercuts the drive to security by creating volatile market conditions. Across Kiambu, rising land prices are driven by speculation close to major new road infrastructure and the prospect of becoming rentiers.Property’s attraction as a store of value is rendered vulnerable within these crowded property markets in which everyone is competing to purchase a plot, driving up prices and forcing buyers towards broker figures like Kiragu and Gakuyo. The “gold rush” on land, as it is known, sparks desperate strategies not to be left behind by its promise of wealth, forcing many into the hands of suspect creditors who offer only non-existent plots.
Taras Fedirko and Whitney Russell are section contributing editors for the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.