The long-running fight over a valuable piece of land in Karen has laid bare deep problems in how Kenya’s courts handle disputes involving powerful people.
Agnes Kagure, a businesswoman and politician who has sought high office in Nairobi, claimed she bought a six-acre property bordering Ngong Forest from British national Roger Bryan Robson for Sh100 million in cash in 2011. Robson died in August 2012.
His 1997 will directed that the land be sold and the proceeds shared among his nephew, the Kenya Wildlife Service, the Kenya Forest Service and an education charity.
Lawyer Guy Spencer Elms was named executor.Kagure and others challenged the will, calling it a forgery. They produced documents they said proved the sale.
Witnesses for the estate, including Robson’s brother Michael Fairfax Robson who testified by video link from Britain, stated clearly that the land was never sold.
Robson’s brother said his sibling remained in possession until his final illness and had even warned that people were trying to take advantage of his failing health.
Another lawyer who had acted for Robson said the signature on Kagure’s papers did not match the man’s shaky writing in his last years, and that the photograph on the document was not his.In June 2025, High Court Justice Hillary Chemitei dismissed Kagure’s succession claim.
The judge examined the original will, found it properly signed on every page, witnessed by two people and drafted by an advocate, and ruled there was no evidence Robson had been coerced or was mentally unfit.
The court found no credible sale documents, bank records or land registry entries supporting Kagure’s purchase story. Costs were ordered against her and her co-claimant.
The will stood. The land, estimated at around Sh600 million, was to follow the wishes of the deceased.
That ruling should have ended the matter. It did not. Parallel criminal proceedings against Elms for alleged forgery and related offences continued. The Director of Public Prosecutions later tried to withdraw those charges. A magistrate refused.
When the DPP appealed, the High Court in early 2026 upheld the refusal and criticised the attempt to sideline the complainant.
Kagure’s side has kept pressing, focusing on technical points about whether the will and titles had been fully certified under succession and land laws.
Hearings have continued into 2026, more than thirteen years after Robson’s death.
This pattern is what mocks the justice system.
A clear will, supported by family testimony and independent legal scrutiny, was upheld after years of litigation.
Yet the process has been stretched through successive challenges, criminal complaints that survive attempts at withdrawal, and procedural arguments that keep the property under cloud. Ordinary Kenyans whose land is grabbed rarely get this level of persistence from the other side.
They face summary processes, missing files or endless adjournments that favour those with deeper pockets.
Cash sales of this size raise immediate questions. Large payments are supposed to go through the banking system for transparency and tax purposes. No solid trail of such a transfer appears to have been produced in court.
Allegations of physical occupation of the property by people linked to the claimant, including the building of walls and eviction of caretakers, have also featured in filings.
These are the classic signs of land grabbing that ordinary citizens know too well: move in, change the locks, and force the rightful owner into court for years.
Kenya’s courts are meant to protect property rights and the wishes of the dead. When a foreigner’s clear will, backed by family and independent evidence, can be fought for over a decade by someone with political ambitions and resources, the message is simple.
Wealth and connections buy time, lawyers and repeated bites at the cherry.
The system becomes a tool for those who can afford to wear down the other side rather than a place where truth is established once and for all.Robson left instructions that favoured Kenyan conservation bodies and education.
Those intentions have been delayed for years while claims that a court has already rejected continue to generate new legal fronts.
This is not justice working as designed. It is justice being tested by endurance and procedure until the original purpose of the law is almost forgotten.
Until the courts close such cases firmly and prevent endless technical reopening of settled findings, the rich will keep treating land disputes as games they can afford to play longer than anyone else.
The result is that the rule of law looks weaker every time a high-value property becomes the prize in a prolonged contest that ordinary people could never sustain.
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