By Aron Kecha, Environmental Governance Expert
For eleven years, the dredges and wet concentrator plant at Kwale hummed through some of the richest mineral sands deposits in the world. When Base Titanium formally closed its Kenyan operation in December 2024, it left behind a decade-long balance sheet that deserves far more public scrutiny than it has received: over Sh36 billion (roughly $279 million) paid to the national government in cumulative taxes and royalties since 2014, according to Business Daily’s reporting on company filings — a figure the company itself puts at over $306 million in total statutory payments since inception. Royalty payments alone reached Sh17.4 billion by mid-2024, rising from an initial 2.5 percent rate to 5 percent after renegotiation, alongside Sh12.3 billion in income tax and Sh5.3 billion in dividend withholding tax to its Australian parent, Base Resources. In its best year, FY2022, the mine contributed Sh8.56 billion in a single twelve-month period; by its final full year it had fallen to Sh5.77 billion, and this year’s Economic Survey shows Kenya’s entire mineral output declining by roughly a fifth simply because Base wound down — a stark illustration of how dependent the sector had become on one mine.
That is real money — until it is set against what the mineral itself actually generated. In FY2022, Base Resources booked Sh34.2 billion ($279.1 million) in revenue from Kwale and Sh9.9 billion ($80.7 million) in net profit — meaning the company’s profit alone that single year (Sh9.9bn) exceeded most of what Kenya collected in the entire following year, and the government’s full take of royalties and tax, Sh8.56 billion ($64.8 million), amounted to barely a fifth of gross revenue. The pattern holds elsewhere in the record: in FY2023, Kenya received $43.71 million in royalties and tax, while Base Resources paid its shareholders a single dividend of $84 million from the same operation — foreign shareholders took home almost double what the Kenyan state, the constitutional owner of the resource, collected that year. Zoom out and the imbalance compounds rather than corrects: over the mine’s full ten-year life, Kenya collected an estimated $279.4 million (Sh36 billion) in cumulative taxes and royalties, while Base Resources’ own half-year filings disclose that dividends to shareholders reached A$217.9 million (about $156 million) in just twenty-eight months — October 2020 to February 2023 alone. In other words, in barely a quarter of the mine’s operating life, disclosed shareholder payouts alone reached more than half of what the state earned across the entire decade. The final full year of production drove the point home starkly: in FY2024, Base Titanium distributed $40 million to its Australian parent while paying the Kenyan government just $16.5 million in royalties and income tax combined — shareholders took home roughly 2.4 times what the state collected in the mine’s last year of operation. A 2.5-to-5-percent royalty rate, levied on export value rather than profit, was never designed to capture a fair share of a resource boom; it was designed to be easy to collect and hard to dispute.
Kenya’s Constitution is unambiguous that minerals belong to the public, not to whoever happens to hold the extraction licence. Article 62 vests unextracted minerals in the national government in trust for the people. Yet the mechanism translating that constitutional ownership into an actual, proportionate return has been a flat, low royalty rate that shareholders in Perth or London could out-earn in a single dividend cycle. This is not an argument against foreign investment — Base Titanium sank over $380 million into Kwale, built a dam, a power line and a port facility, and directly employed over a thousand people, 98 percent of them Kenyan. It is an argument that the terms of the deal, not the presence of the investor, are where the imbalance sits.
The question an op-ed like this must ask is: given that imbalance, where did Kenya’s much smaller share go, and what is left for Kwale now that the ore is gone?
The honest answer is: not enough, and not durably. Kwale County’s allocation documents show it received about Sh1.17 billion as its 20 percent statutory share of mineral royalties for the 2025/26 financial year — channelled mostly into roads, health, education and water. A recent review by the International Institute for Legislative Affairs found an unexplained Sh100 million gap between the stated county allocation and the sum of its own budget lines, and noted that the single largest tranche, Sh700 million, went to roads rather than to any deliberate post-mining transition strategy. Eleven years of extraction, and Kwale has no dedicated trust fund, no sovereign-style savings vehicle, and no earmarked mechanism to convert a depleting mineral asset into a durable local asset — physical, financial, or human capital that outlives the mine.
Kenya does not have to invent this from scratch; it has working examples next door. Ghana’s Minerals Development Fund Act (2016) directs 20 percent of national mineral royalties into a fund that itself allocates a fifth to a Mining Community Development Scheme, layered on top of long-standing corporate trusts such as Newmont’s Ahafo Development Foundation and AngloGold Ashanti’s Obuasi Community Trust — formal, jointly governed vehicles that predate the statutory requirement and are widely credited with more transparent, participatory local spending, even where accountability of traditional leadership remains a live concern. Botswana offers the more radical model: through its 50-50 state-company partnership in Debswana, backed by a unified revenue service that publishes royalty, dividend and export data annually, diamond wealth was converted into one of the highest sustained per-capita growth rates on the continent — precisely because revenue transparency and long-horizon fiscal planning were treated as governance priorities from the outset, not afterthoughts bolted on as the resource neared exhaustion.
Kenya’s Mining Act 2016 already provides the legal hook — Section 183 establishes the royalty-sharing principle between national government, counties and communities. What it lacks is the machinery: a ring-fenced community development fund with transparent, audited disbursement rules; a mandatory mine-closure and post-mining transition plan approved before a Special Mining Lease is granted, not negotiated after the ore runs out; and county-level publication of mineral revenue data to the standard the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative already sets for national figures.
Sustainability, in the mineral context, is not only about rehabilitating pits and restoring vegetation — though Kwale’s coastal ecosystems and artisanal livelihoods need exactly that. It is about whether a finite resource leaves behind a durable, well-governed asset once the trucks stop rolling. Base Titanium’s Sh36 billion proved Kenya can attract and tax large-scale mining. The unfinished task is proving Kenya can convert that revenue into something that outlasts the mine — for Kwale’s people, and for the next county that discovers what lies beneath its soil.
Sources: Business Daily Africa; The Star; Citizen Digital; Proactive Investors; Kenyan Wall Street; Base Titanium / Base Resources (basetitanium.com, baseresources.com.au); Kenya Constitution 2010, Article 62; Kenya Economic Survey 2026; International Institute for Legislative Affairs (ilakenya.org); Ghana Minerals Development Fund Act, 2016; International IDEA, “Mineral Resource Governance in Botswana”; Natural Resource Governance Institute.