Why controversy is Joyce Akinyi's middle name

 Controversy  businesswoman Joyce Akinyi's middle name. Sincethe early 2000s, she has had frequent run-ins with the police, making her face familiar in various police stations and corridors of justice.

She was introduced to the public when she married to Antony Chinedu, a Nigerian businessman with whom she was repeatedly arrested on charges of drug trafficking.

Court papers at one point indicated that the two met in 1998, cohabited and had two children before formalising their marriage in 2004. They have both been implicated in narcotics trade.

But their love ran into headwinds a few years down the line. They got embroiled in a bitter property fight before Chinedu was deported to Nigeria in 2013.

At the centre of the fight was the Deep West Resort on Lang’ata Road, Nairobi. A court ruled in 2018 that 70 per cent of the premises belonged to Chinedu while Akinyi owned 30 per cent.

In 2008, Akinyi was arrested together with former Budalang'i MP Raphael Wanjala in New Delhi, India, after authorities found them with undeclared Sh7.59 million.

New Delhi’s revenue intelligence department and the narcotics bureau suspected that the sum was intended for buying drugs. The couple, said to be lovers, was released at the intervention of Kenyan authorities.

In 2013, Wanjala and the businesswoman were again arrested in Isinya along the Nairobi-Namanga highway on claims of drugstrafficking-related offences. They were found with a large consignment of a white powder.

They insisted they were carrying maize flour they had imported from neighbouring Tanzania. The police released them.

Last year, Akinyi was again arrested at her Deep West Resort and taken into custody drugs trafficking. Police confiscated a white powder weighing four kilogrammes suspected to be cocaine.

She was locked up at Muthaiga police station together with another woman and a Congolese man said to be her associates.

Reports at the time indicated that the DCI Special Crimes Prevention Unit and Anti-Narcotics Department laid am ambush at the Deep West club after several suspects were arrested with sachets of cocaine in different parts of the city.

It was alleged some of the arrested suspects linked Akinyi to a narcotics distribution network in the city.

The suspects allegedly told police that Deep West Resort was the base of Akinyi’s narcotics trade and that the restaurant business was a cover.

Investigators posing as drug buyers had visited the club and said the consignment was hidden in one of the rooms at the restaurant, wrapped in polythene bags.

In 2015, Akinyi was arrested with a suspicious powder believed to be drugs. Alongside three other suspects, she was later released.

This year, she was again in the headlines after a video emerged showing her having a spat with police officers who had raided the club at night for violating Covid-19 curfew rules.