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The 13-Month Rule Is Dead

What every Kenyan employee should know about unfair termination, no matter how long they have worked For years, thousands of Kenyan workers were told the same thing after losing their jobs: that they had not worked long enough to complain. Employers pointed to a single clause buried in the Employment Act, Section 45(3), and used it to shut the door on employees dismissed within their first thirteen months of service. There was no hearing required, no explanation owed, and, employers assumed, no recourse available to the employee. That assumption was wrong, and it has been wrong for well over a decade, even though many employers and employees alike have never been told so. The door that Section 45(3) once held shut has been broken down by the courts. Kenyan judges have repeatedly ruled that this clause violates the Constitution, and it can no longer be used to deny any employee, whether newly hired or long-serving, the right to a fair termination process. If you were let go early in...
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When It All Goes Wrong, What Can You Actually Get

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  The Law You Live, Part Five By Tim Munyi Mugo, Advocate* Four instalments ago we left a young man on Luthuli Avenue holding a phone that had died overnight, being shown a laminated sign about goods once sold. Since then we have watched a gas cylinder meet the tarmac, a tanker of brown water disappears into an underground tank, a pair of shoes lose the right to be returned, and a length of stolen pipe change hands at dusk. Every one of those stories ends in the same place. Somebody wants something back. This final instalment is about what the law is actually willing to hand over, because a right you cannot enforce is a hobby, not a remedy. Start with the seller, who is not always the villain of these columns. A seller who has not been paid is not helpless, even after the goods are sold. While he still holds them, he has a lien, which is the right to keep them until payment. This is the hardware shop that will happily show you the cement but declines to let it leave t...
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When Silence Becomes Discrimination: Unpacking Mbugua v. Attorney General

Case: Audrey Mbugua & 2 Others v. Attorney General & 3 Others On 20 May 2026, Justice Bahati Mwamuye of the High Court delivered a ruling that, on its face, deals with a narrow administrative question: whether the government may lawfully ignore an application to amend the gender marker on a person's birth certificate and identity documents. In substance, however, the judgment reaches into some of the most contested territory in Kenyan constitutional law;   the relationship between an individual's dignity and the state's discretion to simply do nothing. The case, brought by transgender activist Audrey Mbugua together with two other petitioners against the Attorney General and Kenya's civil registration agencies, is worth sitting with, because it captures a pattern this court keeps returning to: bureaucratic delay dressed up as neutrality. How the Case Got Here Mbugua is not a newcomer to Kenyan courtrooms. In 2014, she successfully petitioned the High Cour...
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“No Devotion, No lunch” — How far can faith go at work in Kenya?

The right to freedom of conscience and religion in Kenya's public and private workplaces and institutions By Valarie Ibalai |Advocate trainee In late July 2026, a Kenyan beauty entrepreneur found herself defending her own company's Friday devotion policy after an anonymous employee went public: attendance was mandatory, and not anyone who missed it— or arrived late— got the free workplace lunch that day. The founder did not deny it. In a video reported by K24 Digital , she called the policy non-negotiable, framing it as the foundation of a faith-driven business, and pointed out that Muslim-owned and Hindu-owned businesses build their own religious observances into daily operations too. The story split opinion online, but the legal question underneath it is not uncertain. Kenyan law has a settled answer for how far an employer, school, or institution can go in requiring, restricting, or rewarding religious practice whether the workplace is a hospital, a devout small busine...
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