Kajiado Governor Joseph Ole Lenku has demanded that Tata Chemicals Magadi Limited pay Sh13 billion in unpaid land rates before the company is allowed to resume operations at Lake Magadi, deepening a standoff that has already seen President William Ruto order the soda ash producer to leave the country.
Speaking during an interview on Citizen TV’s Sunday Live on September 13, Lenku described the company’s decades-long presence in Magadi as a case of historical land injustice, accusing it of being the only company in the country that does not remit land rates to its host county.
“We have many concerns about it. We in the county government are supposed to get our land rates. The company is the only one in the country that does not pay land rates. They owe the county government Sh13 billion,” Lenku said.
He insisted the county would not allow the company to reopen until the outstanding bill is cleared, framing the standoff as a long-overdue reckoning for a firm that has operated in the region for close to a century.
Lenku also raised concerns over the sheer scale of land the company controls. According to the governor, Tata Chemicals occupies more than 200,000 acres in Magadi, yet its actual salt processing operations take up only around 11,000 acres of that land, leaving the vast remainder, in his view, to lock local pastoralist communities out of grazing grounds they depend on.
“Magadi is occupying huge grazing land for our community. The salt is only 11,000 acres, yet they occupy over 200,000 acres of land,” he said, calling for the surplus acreage to be returned to residents rather than left idle under the company’s control.
Lenku said the arrangement traces back to the company’s first contract, signed in November 1924 as a 99-year lease, and accused the company of having enjoyed a form of political “protection” over the years that made it difficult for the county to challenge its operations.
Describing an earlier attempt to confront the company directly, Lenku said, “I have been fighting this single-handedly. In 2019, we stormed the Magadi Tata Chemicals industry with 5,000 strong community members. The national government then, using the police, harassed us, removed the county commissioner, and deployed all police officers who were part of that, just to say that Magadi was untouchable. For 100 years plus, Magadi has been untouchable.”
The county’s revenue claim, however, has already run into legal difficulty once before. The Court of Appeal quashed a similar demand from Kajiado county last year, worth Sh17.4 billion, ruling that the rates had never been properly determined under the Rating Act and the Valuation for Rating Act, making the figure arbitrary.
County finance bills had set rates as high as Sh14,000 per acre for railway land and Sh11,000 per acre for other acreage, while Tata Chemicals had offered to pay closer to Sh150 per acre, a gap the courts found the county had failed to justify through a proper valuation process.
Lenku separately linked the Tata dispute to a revenue matter involving Amboseli National Park, telling the interview that Kajiado expects roughly 50 per cent of shareable revenue from the park following its transfer to county management, amounting to between Sh1 billion and Sh1.5 billion annually, though he said ongoing court cases have delayed the first payments.
Lenku’s remarks come as the national government works through its own separate process to resolve the standoff. Mining Cabinet Secretary Hassan Joho has established a joint technical committee with the company to address outstanding compliance issues, following the Ministry of Mining’s suspension of Tata Chemicals’ operations on July 28.
Ruto had ordered the company to “pack up and leave” the country on September 3, accusing it of extracting the area’s resources for more than a century without adequately benefiting local communities, before signalling days later that the Magadi contract would instead be opened up to competitive rebidding.
With both the county’s Sh13 billion demand and the national government’s technical review now running in parallel, the terms under which Tata Chemicals might eventually resume operations at Lake Magadi remain unresolved.
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