A journalist in Kajiado County has been sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of court, following his defiance of a court order in a defamation case involving Katoo Ole Metito, the State House Comptroller. Jonathan Teikan, the Editor-in-Chief of Kajiado Star, an online news platform focused on the Maa community, was found guilty by Ngong Senior Principal Magistrate Agnes Makau on Tuesday.
The case stems from an article Teikan published in August 2024, titled “How Katoo, Sitelu, disinherited Rombo widows, orphans.” The report accused Metito and several officials of the Rombo Group Ranch of conspiring to illegally allocate land meant for legitimate members of the ranch to non-members. It was claimed that the land was being reserved for senior leaders of the Kenya Kwanza regime, including Metito.
In response to the defamation allegations, Metito sued Teikan, seeking a court order barring further publication of content related to the land scandal until the defamation case was resolved. However, Teikan continued publishing articles that linked Metito to the irregular land allocations, prompting Metito to return to court in December, accusing the journalist of contempt. Metito’s legal team also demanded a public apology, which Teikan eventually issued in the Kajiado Star and the Standard Newspaper. Yet, Metito’s lawyer, Shadrack Wambui, dismissed the apology as insincere and urged the court to take punitive action.
Teikan’s continued defiance of the court’s directive led to the contempt charge. In addition to the prison sentence, Teikan was ordered to pay a Ksh.100,000 fine to avoid imprisonment. The case is part of broader concerns over the irregular allocation of land at Rombo Group Ranch, where there have been allegations of conspiracy among officials to favor non-members over legitimate ones.
The controversy over land at Rombo Ranch had previously attracted attention from the Environment and Land Court, where Justice Maxwell Gicheru suggested that there may be a conspiracy to allocate land meant for group members to non-members, raising further questions about the fairness of the land distribution process.
