Airport graft whistle-blower faces death threats

When Nelson Amenya blew the lid on a murky $2bn deal to lease out Kenya’s biggest airport, he didn’t anticipate the backlash he would face: online trolls, a $68 000 defamation lawsuit and death threats. The Mail & Guardian reports that Amenya said he was warned by a high ranking official in Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations he considers sympathetic to his cause. Public furore following Amenya’s whistle-blowing – and news that US authorities had charged Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire at the centre of the deal in his American dealings – saw President William Ruto scrap the airport deal. Despite that validation, Amenya was targeted for speaking out. Businessman Jayesh Saini, whom Amenya named among Adani’s top fixers in Kenya, sued him in France where he is living on a student visa. The court dismissed the case in January, by which time Amenya had won Transparency International Kenya’s Whistle-blower Integrity Actions award and been named by the New African Business magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans of 2024. Only a handful of countries – Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda – have laws that protect whistle-blowers. Kenya does not, despite a years-long struggle to pass one. Elizabeth Duya, of Transparency International Kenya, said Amenya’s fate could have been different if the Whistle-blowers Protection Bill had been enacted. It proposes protections (such as a framework for anonymous reporting) not just for whistle-blowers but also protects their relatives.