written by Investigative Desk InsideKE June 8, 2026
A court monitor found nearly half of ivory prosecutions compromised. The EACC named KWS the most corrupt institution in Kenya. A fisherman vanished in ranger custody and his accused killers kept their jobs. A forest was cleared inside a national park under a licence nobody was shown. This is the record Prof. Erastus Kanga carries into his renewal window — and the record an institution built on opacity has spent three years hoping nobody would total up.
There is a question hanging over the Kenya Wildlife Service headquarters on Langata Road that nobody in official circles will answer directly: will Prof. Erastus Kanga get another three years? His first term, which began with a substantive appointment in August 2023, expires this August. And by any rigorous measure of institutional performance, it has been the most turbulent, scandal-saturated tenure in the organisation’s recent history.
When Prof. Erustus Kanga took over as Director General of the Kenya Wildlife Service in August 2023, he inherited an institution confronting challenges that are structural, ecological and financial in equal measure.  He arrived with strong academic credentials — a PhD in Natural Resources Conservation from the University of Groningen and over two decades in biodiversity work — and the goodwill that comes with any new leadership. He spoke of ending revenue leakage and integrity failures. He told assembled staff that KWS was carrying out God’s work on behalf of Kenya and the world.
Three years later, the record is not one of divine stewardship. It is one of a man who acknowledged every crisis facing the institution and either failed to resolve it or, in several documented instances, actively deepened it. The question of whether he should be reappointed is therefore not merely a personnel question. It is a question about whether the Ruto administration believes that institutional credibility is worth protecting, or whether it has decided that the political convenience of continuity outweighs the conservation cost of stagnation.
The Corruption Anchor
No single data point defines the Kanga era more starkly than the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission’s August 2025 report, which crowned KWS as Kenya’s most corrupt institution. The findings were explosive: job seekers at KWS were reportedly forced to pay over Sh200,000 in bribes to secure employment, dwarfing the national average bribe of Sh4,878. For an institution whose global legitimacy rests on conservation integrity, being publicly identified as the country’s corruption epicentre was not a minor embarrassment — it was an institutional catastrophe. 
That designation did not fall from the sky. It was built, case by case, tender by tender, through a pattern of procurement irregularities that KWS under Kanga appeared either unable or unwilling to check. The most serious allegations involved a Sh740 million revenue collection system tender allegedly awarded to Pesapass, a company that submitted forged documents. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission investigation found that one of Pesapass’s directors sent Sh272,000 to Kanga. EACC recommended prosecution of the former director general and several senior officials.  The file reached the Director of Public Prosecutions and, as of mid-2025, sat there — one of dozens awaiting a decision that has not come.
A separate procurement scandal involved a Sh740 million staff medical insurance tender. The Public Procurement Administrative Review Board made damning findings, determining that KWS evaluators had relied on a forged authorization letter purportedly from Jubilee Health Insurance to disqualify the company from bidding. Even more troubling, the winning bidder’s quote appeared to balloon mysteriously from Sh710 million to Sh740 million in the final award letter. The Board nullified the entire process. 
Taken together, these are not the footnotes of an otherwise competent tenure. They are the headline.
A Conservation Agency That Facilitated Encroachment
If the corruption record is damning on institutional grounds, the Bomas-adjacent orphanage relocation saga is damning on conservation grounds — which, for the Director General of KWS, should be the more alarming failure.
When Kenya Wildlife Service Director General Prof. Erustus Kanga publicly championed the planned relocation of the Nairobi Animal Orphanage, he framed it as an overdue act of institutional ambition. The 64-year-old facility, he argued, had outlived its usefulness. The move from its current 7.2-acre footprint to a sweeping new 89-acre site would transform wildlife rescue services, create 1,000 jobs, expand visitor capacity and generate up to Sh4 billion annually for KWS. 
It was a compelling pitch. The blueprints told a different story. The environmental impact assessment prepared by KWS, which formed the basis of the NEMA licence authorising the project, specifies that a modern car park accommodating up to 1,300 vehicles will be constructed adjacent to the new orphanage. A permanent pedestrian overpass will rise above Lang’ata Road and physically connect the new orphanage to the Bomas International Convention Centre on the other side. 
The arithmetic exposes the absurdity of calling this a wildlife initiative. KWS’s own projections forecast 600,000 annual visitors to the new orphanage, roughly 1,640 people per day. For that volume, a 1,300-vehicle parking facility represents a near one-to-one ratio of parking slots to daily visitors.  Conservationists and environmental analysts have drawn the obvious conclusion: the orphanage is not the project. It is the justification for a parking hub serving the adjacent Sh41.9 billion Bomas International Convention Centre — with the wildlife narrative functioning as the political and legal cover.
This matters because of what is being destroyed to build it. The affected land sits within a zone classified under the Nairobi National Park Management Plan 2020 to 2030 as a Low Use Zone, a designation that explicitly prohibits new roads, new infrastructure, off-road driving and most forms of construction activity. The classification exists because this stretch of upland forest is habitat for black rhino, white rhino, Maasai giraffe, lions, leopards, bateleur eagles, grey crowned cranes, kori bustards and cheetah. 
The process by which the NEMA licence was obtained compounded the substance of the problem. The NEMA licence was not published. It did not appear on any public portal. Conservationists discovered its existence in February 2026, two months after it was signed, and three weeks before the bulldozers moved in.  An agency that champions conservation internationally had quietly authorised the clearing of indigenous forest inside a national park, then moved construction equipment onto the site before civil society had any opportunity to challenge the licence. The agency that is supposed to resist encroachment is now, in this instance, facilitating it. 
The Brian Odhiambo Case: Impunity Made Visible
There is a fisherman from Nakuru whose fate crystallises everything that has gone wrong at KWS under Kanga in a way that no procurement figure can. Brian Odhiambo was arrested by KWS rangers at Lake Nakuru National Park on January 18, 2025, for allegedly fishing illegally. Multiple witnesses testified seeing rangers brutally beat him, undress him, and rub stinging nettle leaves on his body before bundling him into a Land Cruiser.  He has not been seen alive since.
Denis Juma, a convicted illegal fisherman serving time in Nakuru GK Prison, testified virtually that he saw Odhiambo’s lifeless body in a KWS vehicle. A ranger checked for a pulse, found none, and signaled to colleagues that the man had died. The vehicle was then driven away into the bush, and Odhiambo was transferred to another Land Cruiser. 
Six KWS rangers — Senior Sergeant Francis Wachira, Alexander Lorogoi, Isaac Ochieng, Michael Wabukala, Evans Kimaiyo, and Abdulrahman Sudi — were charged with abduction. Yet remarkably, despite facing criminal charges since May 2025, all six continued working at Lake Nakuru National Park without suspension. 
That detail — six officers accused of killing a man in custody, continuing to draw KWS salaries and wear KWS uniforms at the same park where they allegedly committed their crime — is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is a policy position. And the policy position belongs to leadership. Brian Odhiambo’s mother is still waiting for answers. The court has since ordered exhumation of suspected graves within Lake Nakuru National Park following intelligence that Odhiambo may have been secretly buried there.  She will wait more comfortably, and have a better chance of justice, with someone else running KWS.
The Revenue and Climate Failure
Defenders of Kanga’s record point — with some legitimacy — to factors that predate his arrival. The conservation funding crisis is structural and long-standing. In the 2024/2025 financial year, KWS generated Ksh 7.92 billion against an operational requirement of Ksh 19.79 billion, leaving a deficit that makes meaningful climate resilience programming essentially impossible at the required scale.  Park entry fees had been frozen since 2007. The proposed Wildlife Conservation and Management regulations seeking a 30 to 70 percent fee increase have yet to pass Parliament.
That argument is not wrong. The problem is that the one serious attempt to correct it was implemented so carelessly that the courts blocked it. KWS announced new fees effective October 1, 2025, banking on the higher charges to bridge the Sh12 billion annual budget deficit, only to have the High Court freeze the revised fees following a petition by the Kenya Tourist Federation, which argued the changes were announced just two days before implementation, denying adequate stakeholder engagement. It was the second time in two years that a KWS fee revision had been stopped in court over inadequate public participation.  A pattern of identical procedural failures is not bad luck. It is a governance deficit with a name attached to it.
On climate-driven human-wildlife conflict — the issue Kanga has spoken about most candidly — the acknowledgement has not been matched by meaningful response. Between 2022 and 2024, elephants alone were involved in 17,917 conflict incidents, including 7,556 cases of crop destruction, 149 human injuries and 121 deaths. Taita Taveta recorded the highest number of incidents at 6,293, followed by Laikipia at 4,479 and Kajiado at 3,196.  Against that documented scale, KWS’s response has been reactive and confessedly underfunded, with boreholes and water pans the primary tools on offer, and Sh2.9 million disbursed in consolation payments to bereaved families.  Candour without intervention is not a conservation record. It is a performance of one.
The Ruto Parastatal Purge and the Political Calculus
Whether Kanga is reappointed will ultimately depend less on his record than on the political calculation being made at State House. And that calculation has been moving in one clear direction.
KRA Commissioner-General Humphrey Wattanga was forced out after President Ruto directed him to submit his resignation, with the KRA board formally declining to renew his contract and placing him on terminal leave with immediate effect. The board chairperson cited underperformance and missed revenue targets as the basis for the decision, stating that overall KRA performance needed to improve and that the buck stopped with the CEO.  Roads agency chiefs have been shown the door. Energy officials have been arrested. The message from State House has been consistent: underperformance and scandal will no longer be quietly accommodated.
It is against this backdrop that minority voices within the KWS Board of Directors have in recent months been exchanging hushed conversations about one subject: whether Director General Prof. Erastus Kanga has become too costly a liability to retain.  One board-adjacent source told this publication: “The institution has suffered too much reputational damage. There are those among us who feel that a clean break at the top is the only way to restore public confidence. State House is watching what is happening at these parastatals. The climate right now favours decisiveness.” 
Those dissenting board voices are careful to note they represent a minority, not a consensus. Kanga retains defenders who argue that the structural problems at KWS — chronic underfunding, eighteen years of frozen fees, decades of infrastructure neglect — predate his arrival and cannot fairly be laid entirely at his feet. That is a fair point, as far as it goes. It does not go far enough to justify renewal.
Ivory, Courts, and the Complicity Question
The SEEJ-AFRICA court monitoring study published in April 2026 added a further dimension to the accountability burden Kanga carries into his renewal window. Between March 2023 and March 2025, SEEJ-AFRICA attended 774 court sittings across 21 law courts in Kenya, monitoring 125 ivory trafficking prosecutions.  The findings were not about acquittal rates. They were about the texture of what happened inside those courtrooms — and who was responsible for it.
SEEJ-AFRICA found that 18 of the 125 cases were, on a balance of probabilities, compromised. A further 41 presented characteristics or identifiers of prosecution subversion. In total, 59 of 127 cases were either confirmed as corrupted or showed strong indicators of tampering — nearly half the entire caseload. 
The trail of institutional failure in those cases leads back to one place. KWS was the lead agency in at least 98 of the 125 cases being monitored. The organisation’s dominance over the prosecution pipeline means that when cases collapse, the trail of institutional failure leads back to KWS more often than not.  Among the most damning findings were instances where ivory changed weight, composition, or identity between arrest and courtroom — a process requiring either extraordinary incompetence or deliberate institutional cover. In a Nanyuki case, a KWS officer publicly announced that the seized ivory weighed 76 kilograms, while the charge sheet later read 69.2 kilograms — a discrepancy of nearly seven kilograms. 
The SEEJ report states it would be naïve to believe there are not elements within the organisation, including management, who operate outside the rule of law.  That is not an observation about a rogue subordinate operating below the Director General’s line of sight. It is an indictment of the institutional culture that leadership either permitted or actively cultivated across three years.
The Verdict
The case for Kanga’s reappointment rests on arguments of continuity and inherited context. These arguments are not fabricated. They are simply insufficient when measured against what three years of his leadership have actually produced: Kenya’s most corrupt public institution by EACC ranking; a national park forest cleared under a secret licence for what conservationists have described as a convention centre car park; ivory prosecutions compromised at a rate approaching fifty percent; a fisherman’s body unrecovered; and six accused rangers who kept their jobs throughout their criminal trial.
Renewing Kanga for another three years would not be continuity. It would be institutional stagnation formalised by signature. It would tell every KWS procurement officer that forged documents lead to bigger contracts, every ranger that violence against civilians in custody carries no career consequence, and every conservation partner watching from abroad that Kenya has decided accountability at its premier wildlife agency is optional.
The Ruto administration has demonstrated it can move decisively against parastatal underperformance when it chooses to. August 2026 is the moment to demonstrate that the same standard applies where the failures are not merely financial but ecological, legal, and — in the case of Brian Odhiambo — profoundly human.
His mother is still waiting. So is the institution.
