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What dependants are actually entitled to — and the two claims most families never make

By Eugene Mukamba, Advocate

The phone call always comes at the wrong time. A husband, a mother, a son — gone in a matatu, a boda boda, a truck that crossed the centre line. In the weeks that follow, most families are focused on burying their own, not on paperwork.

That is precisely when the law starts a clock that decides how much, if anything, they will ever recover.

We have sat across the table from enough grieving families to know the two most expensive mistakes: waiting too long to act, and not realising there are two separate claims — not one — available to a family after a fatal road accident in Kenya.

The Two Claims Most Families Miss

Kenyan law gives a deceased person’s family two distinct routes to compensation, and a competent claim runs both together.

• The Dependants’ Claim, under the Fatal Accidents Act (Cap 32) — compensation for the financial support the deceased’s dependants (spouse, children, and in some cases parents) have lost.
• The Estate’s Claim, under the Law Reform Act (Cap 26) — compensation the deceased would have been entitled to had they survived, such as pain and suffering before death and loss of expected earnings, pursued by the estate through its personal representative.

Section 2(5) of the Law Reform Act makes clear these two claims exist side by side, not instead of one another.

Where the courts do intervene is to prevent double payment to the same people — the Court of Appeal has repeatedly stressed that duplication occurs only where the estate’s beneficiaries and the Fatal Accidents Act dependants are the same individuals.

A properly pleaded claim accounts for this from the outset, rather than losing value to an avoidable technical objection at trial.

How the Courts Actually Work Out the Figure

There is no compensation table for a human life. Instead, Kenyan courts use what is known as the multiplier method — a formula that has been refined through decades of judgments and was set out plainly in Beatrice Wangui Thairu v Hon. Ezekiel Barngetuny & Another (Nairobi HCCC No. 1638 of 1988), a case still quoted by the High Court today.

The court first finds the multiplicand — the deceased’s net annual earnings, less what they spent on themselves, leaving what they actually contributed to the household. That figure is then multiplied by the multiplier — a number of years’ purchase reflecting how much longer the deceased would likely have worked and the dependants would likely have needed support, discounted for the ordinary uncertainties of life.

Two variables move this number more than any other: the dependency ratio and the multiplier itself. Courts have applied a dependency ratio of roughly a third for an unmarried person with fewer dependants, rising toward half or two-thirds for a married breadwinner supporting a spouse and children. Multipliers have ranged widely — from the mid-teens to well over thirty years — depending on the deceased’s age and the dependants’ ages at the time of death.

Letters of Administration: The Bottleneck Nobody Warns You About

Before the estate’s claim can even be filed, someone must be legally recognised to represent the deceased.

That means applying for Letters of Administration — a process that, left to family members unfamiliar with the Succession Court, routinely stalls for months over avoidable paperwork errors, while the limitation clock keeps running.

The First 30 Days Matter More Than People Realise

• Obtain the police abstract and, where possible, the full OB extract and sketch plan from the scene.
• Identify the insurer and registration details of every vehicle involved — this often determines who ultimately pays.
• Keep every receipt: burial expenses, medical bills before death, transport, and any income the family loses in the immediate aftermath.
• Get contact details of independent eyewitnesses before memories fade or people relocate.
• Begin the Letters of Administration process early — it typically takes longer than families expect.

Time Is Not On Your Side

A claim under the Fatal Accidents Act must generally be brought within three years of the death. Three years feels distant in the middle of grief; in practice, evidence disappears long before that deadline does.

The families who recover the most are, almost without exception, the ones who instructed an advocate early — not the ones who waited to see how the other side would behave.