Lake Magadi: Soda Ash, Tata Chemicals and the fight over Kenya’s mineral wealth

About 120 kilometres southwest of Nairobi, Lake Magadi sits in a deep trough of the Great Rift Valley in Kajiado County.

It is a highly saline, alkaline lake and one of the world's rare places where trona occurs naturally at the surface.

Trona is a sodium carbonate mineral.

At Magadi, geothermal activity helps bring sodium-rich water to the surface, where intense heat and evaporation concentrate the minerals and form trona deposits.

The process is naturally regenerative, although the commercial operation still involves large-scale extraction and processing.

That geology is what turned an otherwise remote lake into one of Kenya's most important mineral sites.

A pre-independence business

The commercial story began during British colonial rule.

The Magadi Soda Company was established in 1911, following earlier concessions involving the East African Syndicate and colonial authorities.

A new 99-year lease was issued to the company in April that year, while construction of a railway linking Magadi to the wider railway network began soon afterwards.

The railway was essential because the mine was far from the coast and its product ultimately had to reach export markets.

The history is also tied to the wider story of Maasai land dispossession during the colonial period.

The agreements that opened the area to commercial exploitation remain part of the historical debate surrounding ownership, access to land and the distribution of benefits from Magadi's resources.

The corporate ownership changed repeatedly. Magadi Soda became part of Brunner Mond, which was absorbed into Imperial Chemical Industries in 1926.

Brunner Mond later re-emerged and regained the Kenyan soda ash operation before Tata Chemicals acquired Brunner Mond in December 2005.

So Tata did not create the Magadi business. It inherited a company that had already been operating for almost a century.

What is mined at Lake Magadi?

The principal resource is trona, which is processed into soda ash, or sodium carbonate.

Soda ash sounds like an obscure industrial material, but it is one of the building blocks of modern manufacturing.

It is used in glass production, detergents and a range of chemical processes. Magadi also produces different grades of salt.

The mining process is highly specialised. Dredgers recover trona crystals and alkaline liquor from the lake.

The material is crushed, washed and dewatered before being fed into rotary kilns, where it is calcined into soda ash.

It is then graded, stored and transported largely by rail towards Mombasa for export.

Kenya is an important player in the international soda ash market.

US Geological Survey data put Kenya's 2024 production at 264,921 tonnes, making it the world's fourth-largest producer of natural soda ash by that year's estimate.

About 249,000 tonnes were exported, with Thailand, India, Tanzania and Uganda among the main destinations.

For Tata, Magadi has been an export-oriented business for most of its history.

The company has said that more than 95% of its soda ash production is exported.

The royalties saga

The tension over Magadi has never been purely about mining.

It has also been about what Kenya earns from the resource.

In Parliament in 2009, the government disclosed that royalties from Magadi Soda were about Sh15 million a year, after the rate had been increased from Sh3 to Sh25 per tonne.

The government added that the company paid roughly Sh1.29 billion a year when VAT, land rates, business permits and other levies were included.

The numbers became politically contentious because Magadi was already a major exporter, yet the royalty component appeared modest compared with the scale of the business.

Kenya's framework has since changed. Under the Mining (Royalty Collection and Management) Regulations, 2024, soda ash is subject to a 3% royalty rate based on the prescribed value.

The current mining regime also provides for mineral royalties to be shared between the national government, county government and the community where extraction occurs.

That shift reflects a bigger principle in Kenya's mining policy:

Natural resources should generate benefits not just for the operator and national Treasury, but also for the communities and counties where extraction takes place.

Friction with the government

The latest dispute did not appear overnight.

In July 2026, Mining Cabinet Secretary Hassan Joho ordered Tata Chemicals Magadi to suspend all mining operations, citing unresolved regulatory issues.

The Ministry listed outstanding royalty reconciliation and payment obligations, inadequate export reporting, lack of a clear mineral-beneficiation strategy, concerns over Community Development Agreements, employment and skills transfer, local procurement and environmental compliance.

Tata disputed the characterisation, saying it had submitted the information and documentation requested by government and had demonstrated compliance with the applicable requirements.

The company confirmed that operations had remained suspended since July 28 pending further government direction.

The courts became involved as Tata sought to challenge the suspension, but the High Court declined to lift it.

History of the dispute

The government-company dispute also sits on top of a long-running legal argument involving Kajiado County.

The county had previously pursued a claim of about Sh17.45 billion against Tata Chemicals Magadi over land rates and royalties dating back to 2013.

Tata challenged the demand, arguing that the relevant obligations belonged to the national government under its lease arrangements.

In October 2025, the Court of Appeal sided with Tata on key aspects of the dispute and found that Kajiado's attempt to recover the amount in that manner could not stand.

The matter has continued through the courts, with the Supreme Court granting Kajiado additional time in 2026 in its broader attempt to pursue the case.

It is a useful reminder that the Magadi argument is not simply Tata versus Ruto.

There are competing interests involving the national government, Kajiado County, local communities and the company itself.

President Ruto's decision

On September 3, President William Ruto ordered Tata Chemicals to end its operations in Kenya, saying the country had not received sufficient tangible benefit from the company's presence in Kajiado.

The government's proposed alternative is not simply to find another miner.

Ruto said new investors would be expected to establish a glass factory and a chemical-processing facility in Kajiado, creating more local manufacturing around the mineral.

That is effectively a challenge to the model that has dominated Magadi for generations.

The old model was built around extracting trona, producing soda ash and sending most of it into international markets.

The new argument is that Kenya should capture more of what happens after the soda ash leaves the lake.