Inside Wattanga’s Final Days at KRA

Former KRA CG Humphrey Wattanga Former KRA Commissioner General Humphrey Wattanga did not lose his job because of one issue alone. His fall was the result of a dangerous pile-up of problems that became too heavy to contain. By the time he exited, he was facing pressure over revenue collection, growing hostility from within the board, political isolation in a system that values usefulness above loyalty, and, hanging over all of it, a Tecno tax evasion scandal that had grown too big and too embarrassing to ignore. What may have started as murmurs about performance and internal dissatisfaction eventually hardened into a broader view within power circles that Wattanga had become more of a burden than an asset. The Nyakundi Report has verified that the Tecno affair was one of the issues that badly damaged Wattanga’s standing at the Kenya Revenue Authority. It was around April 2024 when troubling whispers from inside the Nairobi offices of Tecno Transsion Electronics (Pvt) Ltd began spilling out. At first, the complaints sounded like the kind of internal grievances that troubled companies often try to bury: workers murmuring about unfair treatment, unexplained deductions, foreign staff operating with unusual privilege, and managers who behaved as though no authority in Kenya could seriously touch them. But as more insiders came forward, a darker and much more explosive picture began to emerge. What had initially looked like workplace discontent increasingly took the shape of a major corporate scandal involving alleged tax evasion, labour abuse, suspicious cash dealings, and a pattern of impunity inside one of the most visible phone empires in Kenya. As the complaints multiplied, KRA began paying closer attention. The allegations were no longer merely about office politics or unhappy employees. They pointed to a company that was allegedly deducting PAYE from employees while failing to remit it, handling parts of its payroll in ways designed to avoid a proper paper trail, and concealing supplier transactions and operational costs in a manner that significantly reduced its tax exposure. For a company whose brands — Tecno, Infinix, and itel — dominate the Kenyan market through shops, kiosks, resellers, and distributors in every corner of the country, the scale of the accusations was staggering. This was not a backstreet operator hiding a few coins. This was a major multinational player extracting vast value from the Kenyan market while insiders alleged that the government was not getting what it was owed. The matter escalated in May 2024, when KRA agents carried out a dramatic raid at Tecno’s offices in Cardinal Otunga Plaza, Nairobi. According to insiders, that operation immediately raised hopes among whistleblowers who had long felt ignored, threatened, and frustrated by the company’s apparent confidence that nothing would ever happen to it. During the raid, agents reportedly recovered a large cache of internal documents said to contain details of undisclosed salary payments, unreported supplier dealings, questionable financial records, and transaction patterns that had never been transparently disclosed. There were also claims that large sums of cash in both local and foreign currency were seized, adding to suspicions that some payments had deliberately been kept outside the formal banking system in order to frustrate traceability and weaken tax enforcement. For the whistleblowers, it looked like the beginning of accountability. For the first time, they believed the authorities had enough material in hand to expose the full scale of the scheme. Tecno Kenya Those who had come forward had taken enormous personal risks. Many had already leaked information to journalists, bloggers, and watchdog figures in the hope that public scrutiny would force the State to act. Some spoke of salaries paid in cash, deductions taken from workers that never seemed to reach the taxman, and a culture in which criticism of management was met not w…

Former KRA CG Humphrey Wattanga Former KRA Commissioner General Humphrey Wattanga did not lose his job because of one issue alone. His fall was the result of a dangerous pile-up of problems that became too heavy to contain. By the time he exited, he was facing pressure over revenue collection, growing hostility from within the board, political isolation in a system that values usefulness above loyalty, and, hanging over all of it, a Tecno tax evasion scandal that had grown too big and too embarrassing to ignore. What may have started as murmurs about performance and internal dissatisfaction eventually hardened into a broader view within power circles that Wattanga had become more of a burden than an asset. The Nyakundi Report has verified that the Tecno affair was one of the issues that badly damaged Wattanga’s standing at the Kenya Revenue Authority. It was around April 2024 when troubling whispers from inside the Nairobi offices of Tecno Transsion Electronics (Pvt) Ltd began spilling out. At first, the complaints sounded like the kind of internal grievances that troubled companies often try to bury: workers murmuring about unfair treatment, unexplained deductions, foreign staff operating with unusual privilege, and managers who behaved as though no authority in Kenya could seriously touch them. But as more insiders came forward, a darker and much more explosive picture began to emerge. What had initially looked like workplace discontent increasingly took the shape of a major corporate scandal involving alleged tax evasion, labour abuse, suspicious cash dealings, and a pattern of impunity inside one of the most visible phone empires in Kenya. As the complaints multiplied, KRA began paying closer attention. The allegations were no longer merely about office politics or unhappy employees. They pointed to a company that was allegedly deducting PAYE from employees while failing to remit it, handling parts of its payroll in ways designed to avoid a proper paper trail, and concealing supplier transactions and operational costs in a manner that significantly reduced its tax exposure. For a company whose brands — Tecno, Infinix, and itel — dominate the Kenyan market through shops, kiosks, resellers, and distributors in every corner of the country, the scale of the accusations was staggering. This was not a backstreet operator hiding a few coins. This was a major multinational player extracting vast value from the Kenyan market while insiders alleged that the government was not getting what it was owed. The matter escalated in May 2024, when KRA agents carried out a dramatic raid at Tecno’s offices in Cardinal Otunga Plaza, Nairobi. According to insiders, that operation immediately raised hopes among whistleblowers who had long felt ignored, threatened, and frustrated by the company’s apparent confidence that nothing would ever happen to it. During the raid, agents reportedly recovered a large cache of internal documents said to contain details of undisclosed salary payments, unreported supplier dealings, questionable financial records, and transaction patterns that had never been transparently disclosed. There were also claims that large sums of cash in both local and foreign currency were seized, adding to suspicions that some payments had deliberately been kept outside the formal banking system in order to frustrate traceability and weaken tax enforcement. For the whistleblowers, it looked like the beginning of accountability. For the first time, they believed the authorities had enough material in hand to expose the full scale of the scheme. Tecno Kenya Those who had come forward had taken enormous personal risks. Many had already leaked information to journalists, bloggers, and watchdog figures in the hope that public scrutiny would force the State to act. Some spoke of salaries paid in cash, deductions taken from workers that never seemed to reach the taxman, and a culture in which criticism of management was met not w…