Akisa Wandera,BBC Africa, Nairobi,Damian ZaneandNatasha BootyTuesday June 23, 2026
Kenya’s Health Minister Aden Duale has been found in contempt of court. / Public domain
Kenya’s Health Minister Aden Duale has been found guilty of contempt of court after a judge ruled he had defied an order suspending work on a disputed US-funded Ebola quarantine facility.
Last month, the High Court ordered construction of the 50-bed isolation centre at a military base in the town of Nanyuki to stop until a case filed by a rights organisation could be heard.
But on Monday, the court said Duale had allowed the project to go ahead despite that directive. He is due to be sentenced on Tuesday.
The quarantine centre is meant to accommodate US citizens believed to have been exposed to Ebola during the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The proposal has triggered a wave of furious protests in Nanyuki, around 140km (87 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi, where three people have died as police moved in to break up demonstrations.
One of those killed was 17-year-old schoolboy Sylvester Muigai Ndung’u, who had hoped to become a priest. Witnesses said he was shot in the head, though police told the BBC they were still waiting for post-mortem results to establish the cause of death.
In its court filing in May seeking to halt the project, the Katiba Institute said the arrangement carried “grave and imminent risks” to public health.
The health ministry later argued it had not breached last month’s order stopping the joint US-Kenyan construction effort, saying any work still under way was being carried out only by the Kenyan government in the national interest to shield Kenyans from Ebola.
On Monday, however, the judge said the state could not “avoid compliance by recasting or re-characterising the ongoing construction”, and stressed that a court order “is not an invitation to ingenuity – it is a command to be obeyed”.
Lady Justice Patricia Nyaundi said Duale knew full well that all construction at the Nanyuki site had to cease, yet he permitted it to continue.
In recent weeks, President William Ruto has stood by the plan for the US-funded Ebola quarantine site, saying Kenya received a request from the US to establish the facility and that refusing would be “inhuman”.
He has also urged Kenyans not to politicise an issue “so serious” as Ebola, calling on politicians to steer clear of “reckless” remarks.
As of Monday, Kenya, East Africa’s largest economy, had not reported any Ebola cases.
The outbreak has affected the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 1,000 confirmed cases have been recorded, and Uganda, which has reported 20 confirmed cases so far, most of them imported from DR Congo.
The US proposal has drawn strong criticism from one of Kenya’s largest medical unions, the KMPDU, which questioned why the country was selected to host a quarantine centre for exposed American citizens.
The Congolese city of Bunia, the centre of the outbreak, lies 780km (485 miles) from Nanyuki, with Uganda separating DR Congo and Kenya.
Davji Bhimji Atellah, the union’s secretary general, said KMPDU “will not sit back and watch Kenya be treated as a containment colony for a lethal pathogen that we did not generate”.
According to a spokesperson for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Washington plans to contribute $13.5m (£10.7m) to support Kenya’s Ebola preparedness efforts.
That funding is part of a broader $112m US pledge for the regional response to the outbreak.
