KICC ownership saga started back in 1960s

The Kenyatta International Convention Centre sometimes seems to have been swamped in controversy ever since the foundation of the 32-story building was laid back in 1967.

In those days, and for more or less the first half of its existence, the building was known as the Kenyatta Conference Centre, or KCC. 

At some point in the 1980s, they added the word ‘International’ and it became the KICC.

And in the 21st Century, it has been recast as no longer a simple conference centre but rather a more glamorous-sounding convention centre.

Don’t get me wrong, the controversy is not in its name, it was always about money.

I remember hearing from people who were of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s of a scam involving alleged Kanu Youth Wingers in Nairobi. The rumour was that they conducted shakedowns of ordinary citizens on the streets, claiming they were raising funds to build KCC, as it was then known.

Between October 1969, when Kenya became a de facto one-party state, until the run-up to the country’s reversion to multiparty democratic status in 1990, the issues around the building and its ownership were relegated to the backburner. After all, Kanu was the government and the government was Kanu.

It was the building that housed the ruling party Kanu’s headquarters and, therefore, was presumably owned by that party, and that was the end of it, as far as many were concerned.

However, the 1990-91 report by the then Controller and Auditor General DG Njoroge made the firm assertion that the building was actually owned by the government and not the ruling party.

The Controller and Auditor General’s office was regarded as the last word on the government’s finances, assets and liabilities. But this issue had touched an already sensitive Kanu, which was facing its first major electoral challenge in more than 20 years, in a tender spot. 

Kanu claimed that the building had always been Kanu property, even though over the years it had been managed by different entities, including government ministries.

In July 1992, the Weekly Review reported that Kanu was first issued with a letter of allotment for the plot for 99 years in mid-1969, and was eventually issued with the title deed for the land in mid-1989.

In 1992, then Lands Minister Darius Mbela said the party owned the five-acre plot on which the KICC stands, and that it had been responsible for sourcing the initial funds used to finance the building’s construction.

Kanu’s then secretary general Joseph Kamotho said that back in 1969, the then Minister of State in the Office of the President, Mbiyu Koinange, had declared that Kanu, as a corporate entity, could acquire loans for building purposes.

Controller Njoroge agreed that Kanu was the first to be allotted the KICC land back in the 1964-65 financial year. He also conceded that it had been allocated a budget to build a “multipurpose centre, which would serve as Kanu headquarters and would include a conference hall”. 

However, he said that the project had stalled because the money which it originally hoped would come from public fundraising failed to materialise (refer to the alleged Kanu Youth Winger shakedowns mentioned above).

Njoroge’s 1990-91 financial year report said the government repossessed the plot in 1971 ahead of the 1974 general meeting of the World Bank and allocated funds to Parliament for the completion of the building by 1973.

From then on, Njoroge said, the government managed and maintained the complex with funds provided by the exchequer and rents collected from the other tenants. It even spent a budget allocation through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs International Cooperation of Sh60 million in the 1990-91 financial year to rehabilitate the complex.

Njoroge said in his report that for the building to be transferred from government ownership, a sessional paper would have to be tabled and approved in Parliament. And that in his opinion, such a transfer would be worth more than Sh1.2 billion, which was the estimated value of the building at the time.