President Ruto’s directive expelling Africa’s largest soda ash producer from Lake Magadi has ignited a fierce political battle, threatened KSh7.4B in annual exports and plunged thousands of Kajiado residents into economic uncertainty — with the 2027 election now visible in every line of the dispute.
By James Mwangi
President William Ruto yesterday ordered Tata Chemicals Magadi Limited to leave Kenya, bringing to a dramatic close more than a century of industrial operations at Lake Magadi and triggering an immediate political firestorm as the country heads into one of its most consequential election cycles in a generation.
Speaking in Kajiado County yesterday, Ruto said the government would seek a new investor to take over the exploitation of resources at Lake Magadi, but with conditions requiring greater local value addition and employment. The declaration, delivered at a public rally, was blunt and unsparing. “We have Lake Magadi, we have a big company, we have resources that can change Kajiado County and Kenya as a whole. Tata Chemicals Company, which is here in Kajiado, has been running its contract for over 100 years,” Ruto said, adding: “They have not constructed anything in Kajiado, including even employing people here. I recently told them to vacate and get out of this country. Let them go. They have been taking our resources to India.”
The remarks confirmed what had been building since late July. The Ministry of Mining ordered the immediate suspension of all mining operations on July 28, citing compliance failures under the Mining Act, the Mining (Licence and Permit) Regulations 2017 and the Mining (Royalty Collection and Management) Regulations 2024, following years of fruitless engagement with the company. Tata pushed back immediately, moving to the High Court in Nairobi on July 30 and seeking stay orders in case No. HCJR/E280/2026 before Justice William Musyoka, who ruled against the company on August 7. The case remains active, with judgment slated for October 23 and a mention scheduled for October 6, dashing hopes of operations resuming before then.
The economic stakes could scarcely be higher. Kenya exported 254,779.6 tonnes of soda ash worth KSh7.36B in 2025, according to the 2026 Economic Survey report, making the mineral one of the country’s established export earners. More than 95 percent of the company’s annual shipments — exceeding 350,000 tonnes — go to markets in Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and other nations, ranking soda ash among Kenya’s top export earners. For Kajiado County, the consequences are already visible and personal. The imposing Tata Chemicals facility, which for decades has been the centre of Magadi town’s economy and essential services, stood silent, with the town appearing deserted and commercial activity markedly reduced.
Over 500 direct employees and thousands of support workers have been rendered jobless overnight by the abrupt closure, and the ripple effects extend well beyond payroll. Tata has long provided the town with subsidised rail services to Kajiado, healthcare, student scholarships and, critically in an arid region, water. Ruto acknowledged this dependency when he instructed his Water Cabinet Secretary to allocate funds for water supply to Magadi, describing it as “the only thing Tata Chemicals claim to give our people.” The admission was telling: even as the President ordered the company out, his government was scrambling to fill the services gap it would leave behind.
Into this volatile mix stepped the Democracy for the Citizens Party. Allies of former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, led by DCP secretary-general and Nyandarua Senator John Methu, accused Ruto of frustrating Tata Chemicals for alleged personal monetary gains, terming the company’s closure “a reckless, economically suicidal and legally rogue directive” that “amounts to a dictatorial decree, issued under the guise of regulatory compliance in a scheme of State-sponsored economic sabotage.”
The DCP’s allegations went further than the compliance dispute. “The truth of the matter is, there are huge deposits worth trillions of shillings of lithium metals underneath the Magadi area. Further, there are huge oil prospects in the same vicinity within which Tata Chemicals Limited operates,” Methu said. The party alleged that Ruto wanted to push out Tata Chemicals or acquire a majority stake, then bring in companies associated with his government allies to explore those mineral and petroleum resources. The government has not responded to the specific lithium and oil allegations, and the DCP lawmakers did not accompany their statement with evidence.
Gachagua himself had previously raised the stakes at a Kajiado rally, accusing Ruto of having demanded a KSh3B bribe from the investor — an allegation also made without supporting evidence. The former Deputy President, now positioning himself as the principal opposition candidate for August 2027, has seized on the Magadi crisis as an emblem of what he characterises as an administration willing to sacrifice investor confidence and working-class livelihoods for political and personal gain.
That framing lands with particular force because of the timing. With less than twelve months to a general election, every major government decision is now filtered through a political lens, and the Magadi shutdown offers the opposition a ready-made narrative: a vulnerable community, lost jobs, threatened water supplies and a century-old institution ejected on a president’s instruction. Whether or not the DCP’s lithium allegations carry weight, they do not need to be proven to be politically effective. The allegation itself, repeated loudly enough, becomes part of the story.
Ruto’s counter-argument is neither incoherent nor without merit. His position is that Kenya should derive greater value from its natural resources instead of allowing raw materials to be extracted with limited local industrial development, and that a new investor would be required to establish glass and chemical manufacturing facilities in Kajiado, creating jobs and enabling value addition. Kenya is the world’s fourth-largest natural soda ash producer, supplying one percent of global output — a resource used in glass, cleaning products and increasingly in EV batteries — and the President’s argument that a century of extraction has not produced a single glass factory in Kajiado is not easily dismissed.
But the mechanics of transition matter as much as the vision, and here the government’s position is exposed. Ruto’s plan faces unresolved legal disputes, and will test the administration’s ability to attract an investor capable of preserving export revenues while delivering the local manufacturing the President says is missing at Magadi. No replacement investor has been publicly named. No timeline has been given. The High Court process runs to October at the earliest. In the interim, Magadi bleeds.
Tata, for its part, has refused to go quietly. The company confirmed it had submitted all information, reports and documentation requested by the Ministry of Mining, stating it had “responded comprehensively to the Ministry’s concerns and demonstrated compliance with applicable regulatory requirements,” while raising alarm about the uncertainty facing its employees, contractors, suppliers and transporters.
The Magadi crisis thus arrives as a precise distillation of the political tensions that will define Kenya’s path to August 2027. It pits the government’s industrialisation narrative against the immediate welfare of thousands of workers. It places Ruto’s resource nationalism agenda alongside credible questions about investor confidence and due process. It gives the opposition, and Gachagua’s DCP in particular, a tangible, human story to carry into the campaign season — one set not in Nairobi’s political corridors but in a hot, arid town where people are queuing with jerricans for water.
The lake that built Magadi has not changed. The politics swirling around it have never been more combustible.
The post Ruto orders Tata out of Magadi: A century ends, a crisis begins appeared first on The Mt Kenya Times.
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