Who are the drug lords sending Kenyan women abroad with cocaine?

It has now become a worrying trend of Kenyan women being arrested at various international airports trafficking drugs. Every few weeks, there is a news item featuring a Kenyan woman who has been arrested drugs ranging from cocaine to heroine.

Some of these incidents have been reported by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI). For instance, on October 4, 2025, the DCI reported that detectives stationed at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) had arrested Anna Nekesa Kisaka with cocaine. Nekesa who is 41 years old had swallowed three pelllets of cocaine.

A few months ago, the DCI had also reported the arrest of Caroline Wanjiku at the JKIA. Caroline was arrested with packages of cocaine as she attempted to board a flight headed for Goa, India. The cocaine she was attempting to smuggle weighed 1.3 kilograms.

Whereas these women have been arrested locally, others have been getting arrested abroad, particularly in Asian countries where penalties for drug trafficking are life imprisonment or death.

Take Margaret Nduta. She is serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in Vietnam for drug trafficking. She had been sentenced to death for the crime, but an appeal that was supported by an intervention by Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs salvaged a life imprisonment for her instead.

But the continuation of drug smuggling by Kenyan women even after Nduta’s widely-publicized death sentence shows that smugglers are not about to stop. In July 2025 for instance, four Kenyan women were arrested at Singapore’s Changi International Airport trafficking 27 kilograms of cocaine.

In all these incidents, one thing has become a scary concern: the DCI and the government have remained as silent as a grave on the source of the cocaine that these women are moving through the JKIA before getting nabbed abroad.

Without a doubt, these women are not harvesting cocaine and drugs from their farms: they are getting the illegal products from drug lords who for some strange reason, the DCI and the government have turned a blind eye to.

In a recent expose that was shared by local television station KTN, a drug trafficker was captured on camera moving drugs through the JKIA unnoticed. According to the expose, the trafficker successfully avoided having his carry-on luggage that contained cocaine screened with help from an  individual who was allegedly working at the airport. The helper was captured on CCTV wearing a yellow reflector vest.

READ MORE: 4 Kenyan women arrested at Singapore airport with 27kgs of cocaine

The trafficker then successfully boarded a British Airways flight to London Heathrow. He was arrested upon arrival at Heathrow with the cocaine worth millions of money.

The expose further stated that the individual had previously visited Kenya, raising questions on whether his previous visits were for the purposes of trafficking drugs, and even more alarmingly, from where within the country he was sourcing the drugs from.

As more and more cases of drug trafficking involving Kenyan women pile up, questions remain unanswered: why is the government unbothered? Is the government and its investigative arms willing to have Kenya and Kenyans classified as high risk drug traffickers when traveling abroad or transiting in international airports?

How so powerful are the drug lords supplying women with cocaine that they cannot be investigated, arrested and prosecuted? How many more traffickers are able to bypass security checks at the JKIA, either on their own or with help from corrupt insiders?