Grace Ashiru
The DCI says the pair collected cash on a retail chain’s behalf and kept it. Separately, customers have spent months complaining they can’t get their savings out.
Police in Nairobi have arrested Martin Kariuki Maina and Johnson Gituma Mwangi, both directors of Flexitech Group Limited, the company behind the save-now-buy-later fintech FlexPay. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations picked them up in Roysambu and announced it on Wednesday.
The allegation is narrow and specific. DCI says the two acted as agents for a retail chain it hasn’t named, taking payments from shoppers who collected goods at several branches, and that the money never made it back to the retailer. KES 31.2 million, roughly $242,000. Detectives allege the pair worked with others who haven’t been caught, and that the funds went to personal use.
They’re due at Milimani Law Courts on a charge of stealing by agent, Section 283(b) of the Penal Code. Both remain in custody. Nothing has been proven, and the investigation is open.
Now the context the DCI hasn’t formally connected to any of this. FlexPay users have been complaining since at least the start of the year about withdrawals that stall and support that goes quiet. One customer wrote in July that a KES 15,000 ($116) refund requested in June still hadn’t landed. Others said they’d hit their savings targets and then waited weeks. The agency has not said the two matters are linked, and reporting them in the same story isn’t the same as saying they are.
The complaints sting because of what FlexPay claims to be. It’s a digitised lay-by: reserve goods from a merchant, pay in instalments, collect when you’re done. There’s also FlexPay Goals for target savings and FlexPay Chama for group savings. The company says it isn’t a lender or a financial institution, just a payments and savings facilitator, and its terms put it on the hook for failed transactions and customer balances.
Richard Muchomba, a co-founder, pitched that model to TechCrunch in 2023 on a simple argument: African consumers don’t need more credit, they need a better way to pay ahead. By September that year, FlexPay claimed 600+ merchant partners and 200,000+ customers, a 5% commission on sales through the platform, and $785,000 raised from Acacia Group, LoftyInc, Expert Dojo, Google Black Founders Fund and Renew Capital. Uganda and Nigeria were next. It made TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 that year.
Gituma was named by the company in 2023 as co-founder and COO.
Two caveats worth carrying into any version you publish. TechCabal’s headline says “founders,” but the source material only establishes Gituma as a co-founder; Maina is identified as a director. And the KES 31.2 million case concerns a retailer’s money, not customer savings, which is the distinction that will matter if this story keeps moving.
