In Kenya, the police station yard is where dreams go to rust and registration numbers mysteriously vanish into thin air. If you’ve been “visiting” your impounded bike at Igoji Police Station, hoping the OCS will finally have mercy on your wallet, your time just ran out. According to the February 13 Kenya Gazette - a publication read by exactly zero ordinary citizens - the state is officially washing its hands of your property. They call it the “Disposal of Uncollected Goods Act,” but let’s call it what it really is: a legalized clearance sale of assets that owners were likely too broke or too intimidated to retrieve.

Down in Meru, fifteen motorcycles are hitting the block. We’re talking Captains, Boxers, and Tigers - the literal backbone of the village economy - now reduced to line items in a court order. The real joke? Seven of these bikes apparently have “no registration numbers” and one has an “unclear chassis number.” How convenient. In a country where you can’t pass a roadblock without a cop noticing a missing side mirror from a kilometer away, we are expected to believe these bikes just wandered into the station without identities. It’s the classic Nairobi play: strip the identification, wait for the owner to tire of the daily “storage fees,” and then sell the carcass to a “private bidder” who probably shares a surname with the auctioneer.

It’s not just the small fish getting fried. From a commercial lorry in Homa Bay to minibuses and sedans in Nairobi, the state is clearing its yards like a landlord tossing out a tenant in the middle of the night. They give you a window of seven to thirty days to pay “outstanding fees.” Anyone who has ever tried to “retrieve” a vehicle from a Kenyan police yard knows that those fees are designed to be insurmountable. By the time you’ve finished negotiating the unofficial “facilitation fee” to even see your car, the official storage bill is already higher than the market value of the vehicle.

This is the same systemic rot I talked about in Roadside Tyrants: Why the Kenyan Prado is a Rolling Symptom of Our National Decay. Whether you are driving a luxury SUV or a 150cc Skygo, the system sees you as a harvest. The only difference is that the Prado driver can buy their way out of the yard before the Gazette notice is even drafted. For the common man, the law is a blunt instrument used to reclaim “uncollected goods” that were never actually abandoned - just held hostage until the ransom became too expensive to pay.

So, if you’re missing a Suzuki in Nairobi or a salvage truck in Mombasa, don’t bother checking the station anymore. It’s already been earmarked for a “highest bidder” who was tipped off weeks ago. The law says you are “deemed informed” once it hits the Gazette, whether you’ve seen it or not. It’s a beautiful piece of legal fiction that allows the state to stay clean while they pick your pockets. In this city, you don’t own anything; you’re just leasing it until the police decide they need the parking space.