Elgon Group Payment Scandal: Luo Piny Festival Suppliers Expose CEO Mercy Wamoto in Ksh 105 Million Fallout

When the Piny Luo Festival concluded on the 17th of December 2025 and the grounds in Migori were cleared of the equipment, the crowds and the visible evidence of weeks of coordinated effort, the media coordinators, logistics teams, site crews, sports managers, protocol officers and communications consultants who had made that coordination possible returned to their offices and their homes carrying a reasonable expectation that the invoices they had submitted for work already completed would be honoured within the ordinary timeframes that govern contractual relationships between service providers and the companies that engage them.

What followed instead was a prolonged and demoralising experience of unanswered follow-ups, circular conversations and explanations that shifted in character each time a supplier pressed for something more concrete than a promise, a process that continued for so long and produced so little resolution that a group of these suppliers eventually abandoned the informal pursuit of their dues and did what people do when they have exhausted every quieter option available to them, writing a formal petition, addressing it to the Governor of Migori County, and asking the county government to tell them where their money had gone.

The Work Was Done ¶

The services these suppliers provided were not preliminary or preparatory in any vague sense.

They were the operational substance of the festival itself, the media coordination that ensured the event was covered and documented, the logistics work that moved people and equipment across the grounds in a manner that made the programming possible, the site preparation that transformed a space into a venue, the sports management, protocol support and communications infrastructure that gave the occasion its structure and its public face, and every one of these services was delivered in full, on time, by people who had signed contracts, understood their obligations and met them without the kind of dispute or controversy that might have given a contracting company grounds to withhold or reduce payment.

“We financed parts of this work from our own pockets expecting normal payment cycles. Months later, we were still carrying debts from an event that is already long over,” a contractor said.

The suppliers were not asking for charity or negotiating a reduction in what they were owed.

They were asking for the settlement of invoices that represented the cost of work already absorbed by their businesses, work that had consumed staff time, operational resources and in many cases personal capital that small businesses and independent consultants had committed on the reasonable expectation that a county government-backed cultural event of this scale would be managed by people who understood and intended to honour their financial obligations to the people making the event happen on the ground.

Calls That Went Unanswered ¶

In the weeks after the festival ended, the suppliers did what any reasonable business would do in the ordinary course of a payment cycle, following up with Elgon Events Management and Consultancy Limited, the firm contracted by the County Government of Migori to organise the event and the entity through which all supplier payments were structured and were supposed to flow, and those follow-ups produced the kind of responses that are familiar to anyone who has ever chased a payment from a company that has decided, for whatever reason, not to pay.

The explanations shifted in a manner that itself tells a story, because a company that is genuinely processing payments does not need to change its explanation from week to week.

What began as assurances that payments were being processed evolved into references to delays at the county level, suggestions that the county government had not yet released the full amount owed to Elgon Group, and variations on the theme that the situation was being handled and that suppliers should wait a little longer, a form of communication that is designed not to resolve a dispute but to manage it, to keep the aggrieved party in a state of suspended expectation long enough that the cost of continued pursuit begins to outweigh the benefit of recovery.

“Every time we followed up, it was a different story. One week it was county delay, the next it was processing. But nothing ever changed. We just kept waiting,” one supplier said.

Months passed in this manner, and the festival that had been celebrated as a showcase of Luo heritage and regional cultural pride became, for the people who had delivered it, a source of accumulating financial distress, with small businesses carrying costs they had expected to recover by February finding themselves in June still without payment, still receiving the same circular assurances, and still no closer to the settlement that their contracts entitled them to receive.

What the Petition Revealed ¶

When the suppliers formalised their grievances in a written petition addressed to Governor Ochillo Ayacko, the document they produced accomplished something that months of informal pursuit had failed to achieve, placing on official record a set of facts and questions that the county government could no longer treat as a private commercial dispute between a contractor and its subcontractors, because the petition drew the county directly into the accountability chain by asking it to clarify the status of all payments made to Elgon Group under the festival contract.

“We had no option left. We wrote to the county because all informal channels had been exhausted and no one was giving us clear answers,” a member of the supplier group said.

The suppliers had been told by Elgon Group that the County Government of Migori had yet to settle seventy percent of the balance due to the company, a claim that, if accurate, would explain at least some portion of the payment delays and would shift the primary responsibility for resolution onto the county rather than the contracting firm, but the suppliers were not in a position to verify that claim independently because they had no direct visibility into the financial relationship between Elgon Group and the county government, which is precisely why they asked the county to clarify the record.

What the county's own documentation showed told a more complicated story, because leaked correspondence reviewed by this publication revealed that Elgon Group had formally acknowledged receiving Ksh3.4 million from the County Government of Migori and had informed county officials in writing that its consultants and service providers had been paid in full, submitting a statement of account that recorded an outstanding balance of zero, a declaration that was either accurate, in which case the suppliers pursuing payment had no legal basis for their claims, or inaccurate, in which case a company had made a false representation to a county government about the disposition of public funds, and the evidence available strongly suggested the latter.

The Woman at the Centre ¶

Mercy Wamoto is not a peripheral figure in this story, not an administrative name attached to correspondence or a title that appears at the bottom of a company letterhead.

She is the official within Elgon Events Management and Consultancy Limited whose name is most directly associated with the company's public-facing operations, whose conduct has been the subject of a formal public complaint from one of Kenya's most recognisable public figures, and whose role in the management of the Piny Luo Festival contract places her at the intersection of every question now being asked about where the money went and why the people who earned it have not received it.

The suppliers who filed the petition know her name.

The suppliers who spent months making calls that went unanswered were, in many cases, attempting to reach people within the company whose operations Wamoto is associated with.

The documentation showing that Elgon Group declared a zero outstanding balance to Migori County while suppliers remained unpaid was produced by a company in which she holds a key role, and the gap between what that documentation says and what the suppliers experienced is a gap that exists inside an organisation she is part of running.

What makes Wamoto's position in this story particularly significant is not merely her current role but the fact that she has been here before, that her name was attached to a public complaint involving the same essential failure, money received by the company, services inadequately delivered or funds not passed to the people responsible for delivering them, no satisfactory resolution through internal channels, and that the earlier episode did not result in the kind of public accountability or institutional correction that might have interrupted the pattern before it produced a larger and more damaging iteration involving public funds and dozens of suppliers rather than a single client.

The Akothee complaint, which will be examined in detail in the section that follows, is not ancient history dragged in to create an unfair impression.

It is a documented prior episode involving the same official and the same company and the same failure mode, and in investigative journalism the recurrence of a pattern across time and across different victims is not coincidental colour, it is evidence of a way of operating that has been allowed to continue because the consequences of each individual episode were contained before they could force a genuine reckoning.

Wamoto has not, to this publication's knowledge, made any public statement addressing the Piny Luo supplier complaints or the documentary contradictions at the centre of this dispute, a silence that is itself a choice with consequences, because the longer a named official at the centre of a public accountability story remains silent, the more that silence is read, reasonably, as an inability to offer an explanation that would withstand scrutiny rather than a considered decision to reserve comment.

“We are still waiting for clarity on how payments were processed and why suppliers are yet to be settled,” one affected supplier said.

The suppliers are not asking abstract institutional questions.

They are asking why work they completed under contracts that bore the authority of a county government-backed event has not been paid for, and Mercy Wamoto, as a key official of the company that received the public funds and declared those funds distributed, is among the people most directly positioned to answer that question, and her continued silence in the face of that obligation is one of the most telling features of a dispute that has now lasted longer than the festival it concerns.

A Familiar Complaint ¶

Before the Piny Luo Festival, before the suppliers' petition, before the leaked correspondence showing a zero balance that contradicted the experience of dozens of unpaid workers, there was a public complaint from Akothee, the musician and entrepreneur whose name is known well enough in Kenya that when she chooses to direct it at a company, the company does not have the option of hoping the complaint passes unnoticed, and what she described in that complaint was an experience with Mercy Wamoto and Elgon Group that, read alongside the current dispute, has the quality of a first draft of the same story.

Akothee stated that she paid Ksh 80,000 to the company for event management services covering invitation coordination, guest management and event logistics for an occasion during which she would be occupied with examinations, rehearsals and other commitments, an arrangement that was clear in its terms and that represented a straightforward professional engagement between a client with a specific need and a company presenting itself as equipped to meet it.

What she received instead, as she described it in a detailed public account, was an engagement that failed at every stage it was supposed to function, meetings that consumed time without producing decisions, invitations that were delayed past the point of effectiveness, guest coordination systems that did not operate as promised, and written reports that were committed to verbally and never delivered, until the accumulation of failures reached a point where Akothee concluded that the only way to salvage the event was to take over its operational management herself, absorbing the additional burden of work she had specifically paid to delegate, and doing so while the company that had been paid to handle it continued, apparently, to manage nothing.

Those claims were never adjudicated in a court of law and they remain unverified allegations in the strict legal sense, but the relevance of the Akothee episode to the current dispute does not depend on a court verdict.

It depends on the structural similarity between what she described and what the Piny Luo suppliers are now describing, which is the experience of engaging with a company that takes money, produces assurances, fails to deliver and offers no satisfactory resolution, a similarity that is made more significant rather than less by the fact that Mercy Wamoto's name appears in both episodes and that neither episode, taken alone, produced the kind of institutional consequence that might have changed the company's operating culture before public money on a far larger scale became involved.

How the Ksh 105 Million Was Routed ¶

Understanding the full scale of the public resources at stake in this dispute requires looking at the financial architecture surrounding the festival from the beginning, because the Piny Luo Festival was not funded through ordinary county discretionary spending but through a process that reached into national Treasury resources through a constitutional provision invoked specifically because the original allocation was found insufficient for the event as it had been planned and contracted.

On the 22nd of January 2026, Margaret Nyakang'o, the Controller of Budget, approved a Treasury request for the withdrawal of Ksh105 million from the Exchequer account to facilitate the Piny Luo Cultural Festival under Article 223 of the Constitution, a provision designed for specific fiscal circumstances and not ordinarily deployed for county cultural programming, and the invocation of that provision for this event means that the payment disputes now being raised by suppliers are not merely a matter of a private company failing its subcontractors but a matter of national public funds being channelled through a contracting arrangement that has produced outcomes inconsistent with the representations made to the government bodies that approved and released those funds.

Sources familiar with the payment processing have directed attention specifically to Dr. John Achuora, the Migori County Chief Officer for Finance and Economic Planning, with those sources suggesting that payment documentation related to the festival has been withheld or processed with a deliberateness that goes beyond the ordinary pace of county financial administration, and that the delays experienced by suppliers cannot be attributed solely to Elgon Group's internal management failures but reflect decisions made within the county's own financial structures about which payment files move forward and which ones do not.

The suppliers have now asked Dr. Achuora to publicly account for the status of all payments related to the Piny Luo Festival and to address the suggestion that payment files are being deliberately held while the businesses and individuals who completed the contracted work absorb losses that were never part of the arrangement they agreed to, a request that deserves a public response proportionate to the scale of the public funds involved and the number of people whose livelihoods are directly affected by the answer.

The Network Behind the Contract ¶

Beyond the question of delayed payments, the suppliers' petition has brought into public view a set of relationships within the procurement and contracting structures surrounding the Piny Luo Festival that raise questions about how the contract came to be awarded in the way that it was and whether the processes that ordinarily govern the allocation of public event management contracts were observed with sufficient rigour in this instance.

At the centre of those questions is an arrangement that suppliers describe as operating through personal and professional relationships spanning the boundary between the county government and Elgon Group, specifically the role of Dennis Wasike, identified as a liaison officer within the county government, whose wife Jacquey Kivindyo is said to work closely with the leadership of Elgon Group in a professional capacity that gave the company a level of access to county contracting processes that was not equally available to other firms competing for the same opportunities.

The significance of that relationship, as the suppliers frame it, is not merely that it existed but that it functioned, that the proximity between the county government's internal processes and the leadership of Elgon Group produced outcomes in contract allocation and fund processing that would not have been achievable through standard procurement channels, and that ordinary businesses without equivalent relationships inside the county's financial and administrative structures found themselves unable to compete on equal terms regardless of their qualifications or their track record, a situation that, if accurately described, represents a serious compromise of the procurement integrity that the expenditure of public money is supposed to maintain.

What the Ultimatum Means ¶

The suppliers have issued a fourteen-day ultimatum warning that unless their claims are settled they will commence legal proceedings against Elgon Group seeking recovery of outstanding dues, damages and compensation for breach of contract, and the significance of that ultimatum is not merely tactical but documentary, because litigation would compel both parties to produce records, answer questions under formal process and submit to a determination of fact that the current silence from Elgon Group and from Mercy Wamoto has successfully avoided.

A court process would require Elgon Group to reconcile the zero-balance statement of account it submitted to Migori County with the payment claims being made by the suppliers that statement purported to cover, and the gap between those two positions is not the kind of discrepancy that survives close examination without generating consequences for the party whose version of events turns out to be inconsistent with the documentary record.

The county government carries obligations in this matter that cannot be discharged by pointing to the contractual distance between itself and the affected suppliers, because the county selected Elgon Group, paid Elgon Group with public funds that included resources drawn from the national Exchequer under constitutional provisions, and accepted from Elgon Group written declarations that all supplier obligations had been settled, either without verifying those declarations or having verified them and found them wanting without communicating that finding to the parties most directly harmed by the misrepresentation.

The suppliers who filed the petition, issued the ultimatum and are now preparing for potential litigation are not asking for anything that was not already owed to them before the festival opened its gates in December, and the length of time they have spent pursuing what should have been a routine settlement is itself a measure of how thoroughly the systems that were supposed to protect them from exactly this outcome have failed to function as intended, while the official most directly associated with the company at the centre of that failure has offered nothing that begins to explain the distance between what her company declared and what the people her company engaged have actually experienced.