Kitisuru Manor works halted as court finds Makanjawa in contempt over quashed approval

A long-running dispute over a property on Kitisuru Road has escalated from a fight over planning approvals into a contempt case, after the Environment and Land Court found Makanjawa Company Limited and three of its directors had disobeyed an earlier order stopping works on the site.

Justice Grace Kemei, in a ruling delivered on August 14, ordered the developer to immediately cease construction and renovation works on LR No. 17/261, also known as Nairobi Block 218/770, and comply with orders issued by the court in October 2024.

Makanjawa and the three directors were given 60 days to comply. If they fail to do so, they are expected back in court on October 27, 2026, to explain why they should not be committed to civil jail for contempt. Nairobi City County and a county official who had also been accused of contempt were cleared after the court found the case against them had not been proved.

The latest ruling turns on a deceptively simple question: what happens to a development approval after a court has quashed it?

In Makanjawa’s case, the court found that the answer was not to treat the cancelled approval as something capable of being repaired or “regularised”. Once quashed, the approval had ceased to exist. Any fresh attempt to proceed with the development had to begin with a legally compliant change-of-user process.

That finding now places a hard stop on works at the Kitisuru property and adds another chapter to a dispute that began more than three years ago.

The approval at the centre of the fight

The property sits along Kitisuru Road in Westlands Sub-county.

On January 13, 2023, Nairobi City County issued Makanjawa a development approval, reference PLUPA-COU-000533N, permitting a change of user from residential to residential hotel.

Northern Block Residents Limited and representatives of the Kitisuru Residents Association challenged that decision, arguing among other things that residents had not been properly involved in the planning approval process.

They also maintained that the property sits in Zone 5, which they described as an area reserved for low-density residential family houses. Nairobi County itself told the court in the earlier proceedings that it had considered LR 17/261 within Zone 5 for low-density residential family housing when dealing with the application.

The litigation, however, produced a more nuanced result than simply declaring the entire development unlawful.

In October 2024, Justice Anne Omollo examined two separate approval processes: the environmental approval issued by NEMA and the development permission issued by Nairobi City County.

The distinction proved decisive.

On the environmental side, the court found evidence that meetings had been held with Kitisuru residents in October 2022 and February 2023 and that questionnaires had been circulated. Justice Omollo concluded that public participation for the Environmental Impact Assessment had been sufficiently carried out and declined to quash Makanjawa’s NEMA licence.

The county planning approval did not fare as well.

The Physical and Land Use Planning Act requires the public to be notified of a proposed development and given an opportunity to submit objections before development permission is granted. When the court examined the evidence supporting Makanjawa’s change-of-user application, it found the material presented for the EIA process but no corresponding proof, in the record then before it, of the required public notice for the county development application.

Justice Omollo found there was “no evidence of a publication placed in the local dailies or notice on the site” inviting comments on that planning application.

The court consequently quashed the January 2023 change-of-user approval and prohibited Makanjawa from continuing demolition, renovation or construction on LR 17/261 unless and until a change-of-user licence was procedurally obtained.

That wording would become central to what happened next.

Makanjawa tried to reopen the decision

The developer did not accept that the missing public-notice evidence meant the approval process had been defective.

Weeks after the October 2024 judgment, Makanjawa returned to court seeking a review. It produced a newspaper cutting which it said showed that the proposed change of user had in fact been advertised in the Daily Nation in 2022. It also argued that it had obtained the necessary approvals and that stopping the project exposed it to substantial financial commitments.

But the February 2025 ruling did not reopen the case.

Justice Omollo found that the newspaper cutting had not been part of the evidence before the court when the original judgment was made. It therefore could not establish an obvious error on the face of the record, the legal basis on which Makanjawa had sought a review.

The judge also found that Makanjawa’s wider argument, that the approvals had actually been obtained lawfully, went to the merits of the original decision and would therefore be a matter for an appeal rather than a review.

The application was dismissed on February 27, 2025.

Then came the ‘regularisation’

What happened afterwards ultimately brought the parties back before a different judge.

Residents told the court that they received reports in July 2025 that activity had resumed at the property, including demolition and excavation. They argued that no fresh change-of-user process meeting the terms of the October 2024 judgment had taken place.

Makanjawa disputed that it was deliberately ignoring the court.

The company said it had engaged Nairobi City County, published notices and organised another meeting with residents in March 2025 as part of an effort to regularise the development. Its position was that it resumed works only after obtaining what it believed to be the necessary approvals and that it had acted in good faith.

That March meeting itself illustrates just how entrenched the disagreement had become. Northern Block Residents later said 111 people attended the March 14, 2025 public participation meeting at Kitisuru Manor and all opposed the proposed regularisation. That attendance figure and characterisation come from the residents’ organisation itself.

Nairobi City County, meanwhile, distanced itself from the disputed works. County officials told the court that they had not issued a new approval for the parcel following the 2024 judgment and said a 2025 approval relied upon in the dispute related to a different property. A former Nairobi planning official who was drawn into the contempt proceedings also denied authorising the construction.

Justice Kemei ultimately rejected Makanjawa’s reliance on regularisation.

The court found the earlier orders were clear, that Makanjawa and its directors knew of them, and that attempting to regularise an approval the court had already quashed was fundamentally defective.

“The overall conclusion is that these respondents are in contempt of the court orders,” the judge found.

The court also questioned whether the subsequent process demonstrated meaningful public participation and found that the developer had not shown that a fresh change-of-user approval had been obtained in accordance with the requirements set out in the earlier judgment.

One important detail: Kitisuru Manor was not a new commercial use

The dispute is easy to oversimplify as a developer attempting to introduce commercial activity onto a previously untouched residential property. The court record tells a more complicated story.

Makanjawa told the court that Kitisuru Manor had operated as a commercial hotel, health and fitness facility since around 2000. It produced a development permission dated August 18, 2000 for additions and alterations to a health club on LR 17/261 and argued that commercial activity on the site was therefore not new.

The 2024 court also noted that a commercial facility already existed on the premises when it declined to award residents damages for alleged environmental degradation or loss in property values, saying those claimed losses had not been proved.

That history does not change the latest order. But it matters.

The legal problem on which the residents succeeded was not simply that a hotel existed in Kitisuru. It was the process through which the January 2023 development permission for a residential hotel was obtained, what happened after that permission was quashed, and whether construction could lawfully resume without first obtaining a fresh approval in accordance with the court’s order.

What happens now

Makanjawa and its directors must stop the works and comply with the October 2024 judgment.

The court has also restrained Nairobi City County from issuing or relying on approvals for the property unless a valid change-of-user process is undertaken and the applicable legal requirements are met. Approvals purportedly issued contrary to the earlier judgment were declared invalid.

The ruling does not, however, amount to a permanent judicial ban on any residential hotel development at LR 17/261.

The original order was more specific: construction could not proceed unless and until the required change-of-user permission was procedurally obtained. In other words, the developer could still pursue permission, but it would have to do so through a fresh process capable of surviving the legal deficiencies identified by the court.

That distinction may prove more important to Nairobi’s property market than the fate of this single Kitisuru project.

A NEMA licence and a county planning permission are not interchangeable. Clearing the environmental approval process does not cure defects in a separate development-permission process. And once a court has quashed an approval, the latest ruling indicates that developers cannot simply continue from where that cancelled permission left off.

For neighbourhoods facing growing redevelopment pressure, the case also shows how much weight can sit in what might otherwise appear to be administrative paperwork: notices, objections, meeting records and proof that affected residents were actually given an opportunity to participate.

For Makanjawa, the immediate issue is more concrete.

The works are stopped. The earlier judgment remains in force. And if the court is not satisfied that its orders have been obeyed, the developer and its directors are due back before Justice Kemei on October 27.