Strike-out Appeals, Unjust Enrichment, and Discoverability: Insights from Kenya

This note analyses a judgment of the Kenyan Court of Appeal that implicates issues that have been on the move in private law jurisprudence around the common law world. These issues are: (1) the interlocutory/final ruling distinction that appellate courts in Australia, Canada, Ghana, India, New Zealand, and elsewhere continue to grapple with; (2) when courts can reframe pleadings for breach of contract as claims in unjust enrichment, an issue recently considered by the Privy Council (2020); (3) the essentiality of ‘mistake’ for the purposes of benefitting from an extended limitation period – the subject of continued contention among unjust enrichment scholars; and (4) when mistakes are reasonably discoverable for limitation purposes, which has been the subject of major litigation before the United Kingdom Supreme Court (2020) and the Supreme Court of Canada (2021). The resolution of these issues in Alba Petroleum Ltd v Total Marketing Kenya Ltd could have been usefully informed by – and can inform – comparative common law jurisprudence.