When Nelson Amenya blew the lid on a murky $2 billion deal to lease out Kenya’s biggest airport, he didn’t anticipate the backlash he would face: online trolls, a $68,000 defamation lawsuit and death threats.
“They’re after you, bro. Lawsuits or a bullet, your call. Quit hitting the state and watch your back. One misstep, and you’re gone,” said a caller delivering one of the most chilling warnings.
Amenya said the call came from a high ranking official in Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations he considers sympathetic to his cause.
Public furore following Amenya’s whistleblowing — and news that United States authorities had charged Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire at the centre of the deal in his American dealings — saw Kenya’s President William Ruto scrap the airport deal.
Despite that validation, Amenya was targeted for speaking out. Business person Jayesh Saini, whom Amenya named among Adani’s top fixers in Kenya, sued him in France where he is living on a student visa.
The court dismissed the case in January, by which time Amenya had won Transparency International Kenya’s Whistleblower Integrity Actions award and been named by the New African Business magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans of 2024.
But social media accounts continued to send him messages threatening that his mother wasn’t as safe as he was in France. At one point, his parents called him saying they had been interrogated by Kenyan police over a missing car they didn’t know...
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