After breaking up a multi-billion shilling tax evasion racket within the Kenya Revenue Authority that saw arrest of dozens of employees, the government has covertly deployed National Intelligence Service officers in other lucrative parastatals riddled with graft.
In a mission that heavily borrows from the Military Intelligence – a military discipline that uses information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to assist commanders in their decisions – the spies who were hired as contracted workers in the state bodies are compiling weekly reports on their investigations which they are handing over to their seniors for onward transmission to Internal cabinet secretary Fred Matiang’i and later to Uhuru Kenyatta.
Uhuru Kenyatta and CS Fred Matiangi
Matiang’i is the chair and coordinator of government development programmes and projects, a key pillar in the fight against corruption.
Curiously, William Ruto is said to be in the dark in the whole process, with insiders saying some spies have been deployed to his office.



Top on the list of state bodies where spies have been planted in a mission dubbed by NIS at ‘Unmasking Economic Saboteurs’ include the National Hospital Insurance Fund, Kenya Bureau of Standards, Kephis, KeNHA, Kenya Power, Kenya Ports Authority, Kenya Pipeline, Kerio Valley Development Authority, National Social Security Fund, National Bank of Kenya and Kenya Commercial Bank, among others.
The spies are tasked with gathering bank details of all employees, identities of persons they communicate with – particularly politicians and professionals – their lifestyle and that of their family members and close relatives.
The spies have tracked all the mobile phones of the targeted employees with a view to establish their networks.
The mission aims to break up all the cartels that have been milking the country dry by engaging in corruption in state parastatals and other government bodies.



They are also trailing money transactions in banks in a bid to identify money launderers plus their godfathers.
We can authoritatively report that the spies were behind the exposure of a scandal where Kenya Power lost over Sh35 million in power tokens irregularly sold to customers between January 2018 and February 2019.
The revelations, which were made before the Energy Committee at the senate, contained shocking details of how thousands of Kenyans were duped into purchasing irregularly issued tokens.
The spies at Kenya Power unearthed the fraudulent scheme which was well-coordinated by team led by 13 masterminds, all working at the power distributor.



The irregularly generated tokens were found to have been sent to customers through unofficial channels.
All the transactions were found to have been relayed to customers through personal lines. One such number had transacted close to Sh8 million.
At the National Hospital Insurance Fund, the spies are tasked with unraveling the beneficiaries of the more than Sh10 billion that was paid in false medical claims.
The money was part of about Sh50 billion paid to NHIF by Treasury as capitation premiums for medical cover for civil servants, Kenya Police Service, National Youth Service and Kenya Prisons Service since 2013.
They want to establish the identities of persons who colluded with hospitals to generate the false medical bills for workers who had never sought treatment.
Insiders say the spies were deployed in the state bodies in a similar manner that was done at the tax authority.
Some five months ago, KRA put out a call for contracted workers who would be deployed to work within the numerous departments that dot the 38 floors of the authority’s headquarters.
Hundreds of thousands of applicants responded to the call, but only 2,000 of them were cherry picked by the agency.



The pool of new recruits helped bust the tax evasion racket wide open.
The workers were more than that and doubled up as spies for not only their employer, but other investigative agencies as well.
An intimate information relaying system, sometimes as simple as word of mouth or a seemingly harmless phone call to their handlers or a forwarded mobile money transfer message was enough to tell on their colleagues.
The findings of the 2,000 individuals eventually led to arrests over allegations of abetting tax evasion in a morning raid by a multi-agency team at Times Towers.
The move came at a time when the country’s tax collecting agency continued to fall below its annual collection projections.