CPA Ephantus Kimotho: The Accountant Who Wants to Feed Kenya

By Victor Oyuko 

There is a certain irony in the fact that the man now engineering Kenya's most ambitious water-and-food transformation is, by training, a numbers person. CPA Ephantus Kimotho Kimani arrived at the State Department for Irrigation carrying the discipline of a certified public accountant ; a professional orientation built around precision, measurement, and accountability. What he found was a sector long treated as a rescue operation, something the government turned to only when the rains failed. He has spent the past two years dismantling that thinking.

"Irrigation comes in as a mitigating factor," Kimotho has said. "When there is rain, we store water, and when there is drought, we use that water for irrigation." The words sound simple enough. The machinery behind them is not.

A Professional Built Across Sectors

CPA Kimotho's trajectory into public service is the kind that rewards scrutiny. Before he became one of President William Ruto's 51 Principal Secretaries sworn in during December 2022, he had already built a reputation in financial and accounting circles; his CPA designation reflecting a grounding in institutional governance, public finance, and resource management that would later prove instrumental in how he approaches development work.

When President William Ruto's administration took office following the August 2022 general elections, Kimotho was entrusted with the State Department for Forestry under the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry; not an obvious posting for an accountant. Yet the assignment revealed something essential about his character: an ability to rapidly internalise the technical demands of a sector while applying an administrator's eye for systems, measurable targets, and delivery timelines.

 The Forestry Chapter: Learning to Think in Ecosystems

His forestry tenure was not a transitional interlude. It was where Kimotho first demonstrated his capacity to translate presidential ambition into structured programmes. He was handed one of the Ruto administration's flagship environmental pledges; the campaign to plant 15 billion trees across Kenya over ten years, targeting the rehabilitation and restoration of 10.6 million hectares of degraded landscapes.

To move a pledge of that scale from slogan to programme, Kimotho helped architect the Forest and Landscape Restoration Implementation Plan 2023–2027. He facilitated the development of a National Forest Policy whose central ambition was to push Kenya's tree cover to 30 percent. He also led work on Kenya's REDD+ registry and was instrumental in what became a landmark moment: the signing of a Letter of Intent to supply high-integrity emissions reduction credits to the LEAF Coalition; the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance initiative. Kenya became only the second African nation to sign this agreement with Emergent, the coalition's administrative coordinator. Under Kimotho's watch, forest resources were no longer treated as a preservation matter alone. He presided over the formulation of Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) and Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) frameworks, formal mechanisms to capture the total economic value that forests generate ;a conceptual shift from conservation as cost to conservation as asset.

He also tackled the unglamorous work: developing a national strategy for managing the invasive Prosopis juliflora tree species, which had colonised vast tracts of productive land in Kenya's drylands, displacing indigenous vegetation and farming communities. It was detail-oriented, technical, and carried no headlines. It mattered enormously.

The Move to Irrigation: From Trees to Water

His transfer to the State Department for Irrigation brought him directly into the conversation about Kenya's food future. The department's mandate covers national irrigation policy, water harvesting and storage, the management of irrigation schemes, flood control, infrastructure development, and land reclamation. On paper, it is an administrative brief. In practice, it is the question of whether Kenya can feed itself.

When Kimotho arrived, the country's irrigated land stood at approximately 664,000 acres; a figure that represents a fraction of what Kenya's arable potential permits. The government's five-year plan (2023–2028) sets a target of 1,289,142 acres under irrigation. That requires more than doubling what had been achieved over decades. It also requires water: the plan projects increasing water for irrigation from 55.4 million cubic metres to 2,379.2 million cubic metres ;a forty-three-fold expansion. The production targets that flow from this are equally striking: rice output is expected to climb from 193 metric tonnes to 700 metric tonnes, and maize from 18 million kilograms to 456.75 million kilograms.

PS Kimotho did not inherit a department in crisis. He inherited one operating well below its ceiling. His job was, and remains, to raise it.

The Architecture of Impact

Perhaps the clearest expression of Kimotho's administrative style is the National Irrigation Sector Investment Plan;  NISIP. Launched in March 2025 at the KICC in Nairobi, NISIP is a ten-year strategic blueprint designed to mobilise government resources, development partners, and private capital around a single coherent vision. It is the kind of document that separates departments that think from departments that do.

At its core, NISIP sets a target of bringing an additional one million acres under irrigation, with particular emphasis on smallholder farmers in areas where large-scale investment has historically bypassed rural households. NISIP is also the vehicle through which Kenya is now courting international partners; the World Bank, UNOPS, and, most recently, Portugal; not as donors, but as structured financing and technical partners in a programme that has been deliberately designed to be bankable.

The six-dam programme that PS Kimotho announced for 2026 illustrates both the ambition and the methodology. The Lowaat Dam in Turkana, Radat Dam in Baringo, Thuci Dam in Embu, Basingila Dam in Isiolo, the High Falls Dam serving Kitui and Tharaka Nithi, and the Galana Dam spanning Tana River and Kilifi counties represent six projects drawn from a pipeline of 19 mega dams that the State Department is implementing as part of President Ruto's broader 50-dam national agenda. The six that are breaking ground first are not simply the largest ; they are the most "project-ready," having already secured land and cleared downstream irrigation infrastructure assessments. This sequencing is deliberate.

In January 2026, PS Kimotho hosted a World Bank delegation at Maji House to discuss the Kenya Sustainable Irrigation for Resilient Economy (K-RISE) programme. The framework covers four components: Farmer-Led Irrigation Development, High Performance Public and Community Irrigation Schemes, Water Security and Climate Resilient Landscapes, and Sector Coordination. Simultaneously, he outlined a financing structure built around Special Purpose Vehicles, Viability Gap Financing, credit enhancement tools, and capital market instruments; language that would be at home in a development finance institution boardroom. That comfort with structured finance, rare in technical sector administrators, is directly traceable to his accounting background.

The Human Dimension

PS Kimotho also makes a point of anchoring these infrastructure arguments in the lived reality of the farmers they serve. At the 2026 World Water Day celebrations in Meru County, he directed attention to something easily overlooked in dam-and-hectare reporting: the gendered cost of water scarcity.

Women, he noted, contribute approximately 70 percent of agricultural labour in Kenya. They are also the ones who travel furthest when water is scarce, the ones who bear the weight of drought-shortened harvests, the ones whose time and opportunity diminish when irrigation access is absent. His push to expand irrigation! particularly in the ASALs, where the state is constructing water pans to supply 296,720,000 cubic metres of water and harvest 517.5 million cubic metres annually; carries this social calculus alongside the agronomic one.

He also commissioned the Nguruman Irrigation Scheme in early 2026, a project benefitting over 10,000 farming households, and has overseen the launch of a farmer-led irrigation financing initiative that links smallholders to financial institutions, targeting the de-risked addition of 40,000 acres of irrigated farmland annually.

What the Ledger Says

PS Kimotho's impact story is still being written. The mega dams are beginning construction. The NISIP is in implementation. The K-RISE programme is being structured. The food production targets are aspirational but grounded in specific water mathematics.

What is already legible, though, is a pattern: a public servant who arrived in government with financial rigour and found in two demanding sectors; forestry and irrigation; a stage on which to apply it. He brought the LEAF Coalition to Kenya's forests. He brought a ten-year investment plan to Kenya's irrigation. He brought the discipline of a balance sheet to the question of whether farmers in Turkana and Isiolo will have water in the dry season.

That, in the end, may be his most distinctive contribution: treating Kenya's food and water security not as a humanitarian concern to be managed, but as an investment problem to be solved. The accountant, it turns out, had exactly the right training for the job.

Article by Victor Patience Oyuko. To buy coffee Mpesa 0708883777