City lawyer Mathew Kyalo Mbobu was shot dead Tuesday evening along Magadi Road in Nairobi in what police believe was a targeted killing, ending the life of an advocate who spent nearly three decades navigating some of Kenya’s most contentious legal disputes.
The attack unfolded around 5:40 p.m. as Mbobu was driving home. Police said two men on motorcycles trailed his vehicle before spraying it with bullets and speeding off. The lawyer was struck several times and died on the spot. Detectives cordoned off the scene, later towing his vehicle to Lang’ata Police Station as they reviewed CCTV footage from nearby roads. “This was clearly targeted,” a senior detective said, though the motive remains unclear. The shooting caused a major traffic snarl-up on Lang’ata Road as investigators combed the area.
For colleagues, the violent end stood in stark contrast to the courtroom presence Mbobu embodied — precise, relentless, and unafraid of big fights. In 2005, he won Sh1.5 million in damages in a defamation case against politician Rose Mbithe Ndetei, a ruling upheld after her attempt to overturn it collapsed in the Court of Appeal.
But Mbobu’s career was also marked by bruising commercial clashes. In March this year, the High Court ordered him to pay Sh97 million to Corat Africa, rejecting his argument that the money was protected under an advocate’s lien. The court allowed him to retain Sh8.6 million in legal fees, but the ruling underscored the high stakes of the disputes he often handled.
His battles stretched into boardrooms and institutions. After the Energy and Petroleum Tribunal directed him to pay Sh421,400 to Kenya Power, he secured a temporary stay from the Environment and Land Court pending appeal. Years earlier, he had pressed the courts to clarify how judges could interfere with taxing officers’ decisions in a dispute with St. Paul Thomas Academy Limited.
Not all victories carried millions. In 2016, he won a modest Sh370,000 in a civil case, and in 2015 he clashed in court with the late businessman Jacob Juma, a reminder of his reach across Nairobi’s legal and political networks.
Beyond litigation, Mbobu chaired the Political Parties Disputes Tribunal and the Business Rent Tribunal, taught law at the University of Nairobi and Kenya School of Law, and authored The Law and Practice of Evidence in Kenya, a text still cited by students.
Now, as his colleagues mourn, investigators are left to piece together why a lawyer who built his career on the sharp edge of the law was gunned down on a Nairobi roadside — a life defined by triumphs and turbulence, cut short in a hail of bullets.
