https://new.kenyalaw.org/akn/ke/judgment/keelrc/2026/2222

Riggern v Base Titanium Limited (Employment and Labour Relations Cause E135 of 2025) [2026] KEELRC 2222 (KLR) (30 July 2026) (Ruling) Neutral citation: [2026] KEELRC 2222 (KLR) Republic of Kenya In the Employment and Labour Relations Court at Mombasa Employment and Labour Relations Cause E135 of 2025 K Ocharo, J July 30, 2026 Between Kionga Ahmed Riggern Claimant and Base Titanium Limited Respondent (Being a Ruling on the Respondent's Notice of Preliminary Objection dated 13th May 2026) Ruling A. Introduction 1.This Ruling determines the Notice of Preliminary Objection dated 13th May 2026, filed by the Respondent, Base Titanium Limited, against the Claimant's Amended Statement of Claim. The sole ground of objection is that the suit is time-barred, the Respondent contending that the cause of action arose on 13th October 2016, over nine years before the suit was instituted, and that the applicable limitation period under the Employment Act, 2007 has long since expired. 2.The objection is opposed by the Claimant, Kionga Ahmed Riggern, who filed both a document styled "Claimant's Response to the Respondent's Notice of Preliminary Objection" and separate "Claimant's Written Submissions in Opposition to the Respondent's Preliminary Objection." The Claimant's position, in essence, is that the injury complained of was continuing in nature, persisting throughout his employment until his termination on redundancy on 31st December 2024, and that the suit, filed on 29th December 2025, is accordingly well within time. 3.By directions of this Court, the objection was canvassed by way of written submissions, which both parties duly filed, together with the authorities upon which each relies. B. The Pleadings and Background 4.It is useful, before turning to the objection itself, to set out briefly the material on record, since it is that material — and not merely the parties' rival characterisations of it that the Court must examine in order to determine whether the objection raises a pure point of law. 5.The Claimant was engaged by the Respondent under a contract of employment dated 23rd September 2013. Effective 1st February 2014, he was placed in the position of Mining Shift Supervisor-Trainee at a monthly salary of Kshs. 90,000. The Respondent avers that the Claimant successfully completed his probation on 24th March 2014, and that the position he held was, in any event, a substantive one and not a probationary or acting one. The Claimant, for his part, contends that he remained a trainee for some 31 months, well beyond the six-month probationary period contemplated by his contract and the law, and that this delay in confirmation, and the Respondent's consequent failure to remunerate him on a par with his peers, is the source of his grievance. 6.By a letter dated 13th October 2016, the Claimant's status was changed to Shift Supervisor-TSF; by the same letter he was informed that he was not eligible for a salary increment at that time, his salary remaining at Kshs. 112,692. The Respondent avers that the Claimant voluntarily accepted the terms of that letter. The Claimant, in his Response, does not deny signing the letter or continuing to work, but avers that in doing so, and in continuing to raise his grievance internally, he did not thereby forfeit his claim to have been confirmed within six months of the commencement of his probation and remunerated on the same basis as his peers. 7.The Claimant avers, and annexes correspondence in purported support, that he continued to raise the grievance internally after October 2016 — through the Fair Treatment mechanism said to be provided for at clause 4.4(d) of his contract of employment, through a direct approach to the General Manager, through a detailed letter dated 14th November 2019, and that the Respondent responded, at least in part, through internal memoranda dated 26th November 2019 and 19th February 2020. The Claimant further avers that his subsequent remuneration — including an acting allowance calculated at 15% of a salary he characterises as itself suppressed, and a consolidated salary of Kshs. 153,076.25 as at December 2020 — continued to derive from, and be depressed by, the salary structure of which he complains, such that the financial prejudice persisted until his employment was terminated by way of redundancy on 31st December 2024. 8.The Claimant instituted this suit by a Memorandum of Claim filed on 29th December 2025, and thereafter filed an Amended Memorandum of Claim on 30th April 2026. The Respondent filed its Response to the Amended Statement of Claim on 13th May 2026, in which, at paragraph 15, it pleaded that the claim was time-barred and gave notice that it would raise a preliminary objection "at the earliest opportune time." On the same date, 13th May 2026, the Respondent filed the Notice of Preliminary Objection now before the Court. C. The Respondent's Preliminary Objection 9.The Notice of Preliminary Objection is brief, and is reproduced in material part: that "the suit filed by the Claimant herein is time barred," the Claimant's Memorandum of Claim and Amended Memorandum of Claim being "founded on a cause of action that arose on 13th October 2016." 10.In its written submissions in support of the objection, the Respondent elaborates that the Claimant's claim is "primarily based on his employment period with the Respondent between 3rd March 2014 and 13th October 2016," that the suit was filed on 29th December 2025, and that, applying a three-year limitation period, the claim is hopelessly out of time. The Respondent relies on Koyabe v Kenya National Union of Teachers & Another (Cause E330 of 2024) [2025] KEELRC 3202 (KLR), Attorney General & Another v Andrew Maina Githinji [2016] eKLR, Oluoch v Attorney General (Cause E018 of 2025) [2025] KEELRC, Beatrice Kahai Adagala v Postal Corporation of Kenya [2015] eKLR, and Thuranira Karauri v Agnes Ncheche [1997] eKLR, for the propositions that a claim founded on a contract of service must ordinarily be filed within three years of the accrual of the cause of action, that the limitation period is mandatory and not amenable to extension, and that a suit filed outside the prescribed period divests the Court of jurisdiction. 11.The Court observes, without at this stage attaching any weight to it, that the Respondent's Notice of Preliminary Objection and its written submissions cite the limitation provision as "section 89" of the Employment Act, whereas the Claimant proceeds on the footing that the provision is section 90. It is important to point out that section 89 is the applicable section following a recent revision of the Act. Nothing turns on this discrepancy for present purposes: both numbering conventions are used, in the material before this Court, to refer to one and the same substantive provision — that a civil action founded on a contract of service must be commenced within three years after the act, neglect or default complained of, save that where the injury or damage is of a continuing nature, the action may be commenced within twelve months after the cessation of that injury. It is the substance of that provision, not its numbering, that governs the outcome of this objection. D. The Claimant's Opposition 12.The Claimant opposes the objection on two related fronts. 13.First, in a document styled "Claimant's Response to the Respondent's Notice of Preliminary Objection," running to twenty-nine numbered paragraphs and annexing eleven separate documents (marked KARC-1 to KARC-11), the Claimant sets out, largely for the first time, a detailed factual narrative: the terms of his original 2013 contract, the circumstances of his 2014 probation and confirmation, the internal grievance correspondence exchanged between 2016 and 2020, a comparison of his remuneration with that of a named peer, and his characterisation of the Respondent's conduct as demonstrating a continuing and unresolved dispute. This document is unsigned, undated, and unsworn; it is not framed as an affidavit, nor is it a pleading contemplated by the ordinary course of proceedings once issue has been joined on the Amended Statement of Claim and the Response thereto. Its final two paragraphs (28 and 29) assert that determination of when the cause of action accrued, and whether the injury was continuing, requires "examination of evidence, correspondence, acknowledgements, remuneration progression and surrounding facts," rendering the objection unsuitable for determination as a pure preliminary objection within Mukisa Biscuit Manufacturing Co. Ltd v West End Distributors Ltd [1969] EA 696. 14.Second, and separately, the Claimant filed "Claimant's Written Submissions in Opposition to the Respondent's Preliminary Objection," a twenty-two paragraph document properly confined to legal argument. There, the Claimant submits that a preliminary objection must raise a pure point of law, citing Mukisa Biscuit (supra), and that the question whether the injury complained of was continuing — engaging as it does the entitlement to salary progression, the existence and extent of underpayment, the continuity of the alleged injury, the effect of the internal grievances raised, and the date of cessation — cannot be resolved without evidence. The Claimant relies further on Omar v Nyatangi (Appeal E102 of 2024) [2024] KEELRC 13408 (KLR), Radar Limited v Nyaata (Appeal E091 of 2022) [2023] KEELRC 1203 (KLR), The German School Society & Another v Ohany & Another [2023] KECA 894 (KLR), and Thuita v Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (Cause 193 of 2019) [2024] KEELRC 208 (KLR), for the proposition that a continuing failure to pay dues properly owed under a contract of employment constitutes a continuing injury which ceases, for limitation purposes, only upon the termination of the employment relationship or the cure of the default, whichever first occurs. E. Issues for Determination 15.Arising from the foregoing, the following issues fall for determination:(a)what, on the authorities, constitutes a well-taken preliminary objection, and what distinguishes it from an objection that, however framed, in truth invites the Court to resolve disputed facts;(b)whether, applying those principles to the pleadings and material before this Court, the Respondent's objection that the suit is time-barred can properly be determined without recourse to evidence, or whether it must instead abide the hearing;(c)what comment, if any, is warranted on the recurring practice of advocates and litigants raising preliminary objections in circumstances where, from the outset, the objection is unlikely to meet the threshold for a pure point of law, and the effect of that practice on the administration of justice; and(d)what comment, if any, is warranted on the practice — exemplified in this very application — of filing a document styled as a "response" to a preliminary objection, as opposed to confining opposition to written or oral submissions. F. Analysis and Determination (i) What Constitutes a Well-Taken Preliminary Objection 16.The starting point, as it is in every case of this kind, is the locus classicus, Mukisa Biscuit Manufacturing Co. Ltd v West End Distributors Ltd [1969] EA 696. There, Law, J.A. defined a preliminary objection as "a point of law which has been pleaded, or which arises by clear implication out of pleadings, and which if argued as a preliminary point may dispose of the suit." Newbold, P., in the same case, sounded the caution that has since guided this Court and others in every subsequent application of the doctrine: "A preliminary objection is in the nature of what used to be a demurrer. It raises a pure point of law which is argued on the assumption that all the facts pleaded by the other side are correct. It cannot be raised if any fact has to be ascertained or if what is sought is the exercise of judicial discretion." The rationale is not difficult to discern: a preliminary objection, precisely because it is capable of disposing of a suit without the expense, delay and inconvenience of a full trial, must be confined to matters that can be determined on the pleadings alone, taking the facts pleaded by the opposite party as true, and applying the law to them. The moment a court is required to weigh, test, or choose between competing versions of fact, it has left the domain of preliminary objection and entered the domain of trial. 17.That principle has been consistently applied and further refined by this Court and superior courts. In Oraro v Mbaja [2005] eKLR, Ojwang, J. (as he then was) reaffirmed and elaborated upon the Mukisa Biscuit test in terms that bear direct application here: "a preliminary objection is now well identified as, and declared to be, a point of law which must not be blurred with factual details liable to be contested and in any event, to be proved through the process of evidence." The learned Judge went further to observe that where an objection, though dressed in the language of law, in truth requires the court to make findings on contested factual matters such as, in that case, questions touching on the conduct of parties and the circumstances surrounding disputed transactions — it ceases to be a true preliminary objection, "and assertions which raise factual aspects, requiring proof, or seeking to adduce evidence for its authentication," cannot properly be resolved on that footing. Read together, Mukisa Biscuit and Oraro v Mbaja establish that a well-taken preliminary objection is one that(a)is founded squarely and exclusively on the pleadings as they stand;(b)does not require the Court to resolve any dispute as to fact, however described or dressed up;(c)does not call for the exercise of judicial discretion; and(d)is, if upheld, capable of disposing of the suit, or a discrete and severable part of it, in its entirety. (ii) Application to the Pleadings: The Objection Requires Evidence and Must Fail 18.Applying those principles to the material before the Court, the Respondent's objection cannot, in this Court's assessment, be resolved as a pure point of law, for the following interlocking reasons. 19.First, the objection proceeds on the premise that the Claimant's cause of action is a single, discrete event crystallised by the letter of 13th October 2016 — that is, the decision to change the Claimant's designation without a corresponding salary increment. But that premise is itself disputed on the pleadings. The Respondent avers that the Claimant "voluntarily accepted" the terms of the October 2016 letter, treating the matter as closed from that date. The Claimant, in response, avers that his continued performance of his duties and his continued, repeated pursuit of the grievance through internal channels — the Fair Treatment mechanism said to be provided under clause 4.4(d) of his contract, a direct approach to the General Manager, a detailed letter of 14th November 2019, and the Respondent's own memoranda of 26th November 2019 and 19th February 2020 — demonstrate that the matter was never accepted as closed, and that the underpayment he complains of continued to recur in his pay throughout his employment. Whether the Claimant's acceptance of the October 2016 letter, and his subsequent conduct, in fact operated to close out his claim, or whether, as he contends, the underpayment persisted and re-accrued with every salary payment thereafter, is quintessentially a question of fact. It cannot be answered by reference to the pleadings alone; it requires an assessment of the internal correspondence annexed by the Claimant, the memoranda said to have been issued by the Respondent, and, in all likelihood, oral evidence as to what passed between the parties internally over a period spanning nearly a decade. 20.Second, and flowing from the first, the question of when — if at all — a continuing injury of the kind alleged by the Claimant "ceased," for purposes of the twelve-month proviso relied upon by the Claimant, is not a matter that can be resolved on the pleadings as they stand. This Court has had regard to the line of authority the parties themselves have placed before it — Radar Limited v Nyaata (supra), where Mbaru, J. held that "a continuing injury or damage would entail a continuum of facts within employment," which "does not abate" upon termination but may form part of a claim lodged within the meaning of section 90 (or, as now numbered, section 89); Omar v Nyatangi (supra), where the Court held that non-payment of a due such as house allowance "is a continuing injury for as long as it remains unpaid," to be lodged within twelve months of the termination that brings the relationship, and with it the continuing injury, to an end; and Thuita v Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (supra), where the Court upheld a similar preliminary objection, but did so only after finding, on facts that were not seriously in dispute, precisely when the claimant's engagement, and with it the alleged continuing injury had come to an end. It is that last distinction that is decisive here: in Thuita, the date of cessation of the continuing injury was ascertainable from the undisputed terms of the claimant's final, fixed-term engagement; in the present case, whether and for how long the alleged underpayment continued to recur, and whether it in fact persisted without interruption or cure through to the Claimant's termination on 31st December 2024 — as opposed to having been resolved, waived, or overtaken by subsequent events at some earlier point, are matters that are squarely disputed on the pleadings and cannot be determined without evidence. 21.Third, the Respondent's own pleadings confirm that this is not a case in which the material facts are undisputed. In its Response to the Amended Statement of Claim, the Respondent denies that the Claimant was on probation as alleged, avers that he successfully completed probation on 24th March 2014 (a date the Claimant does not accept as marking the end of the relevant probationary period), denies that other Shift Supervisors were remunerated at the range the Claimant alleges, and denies that the Claimant's subsequent remuneration was in any way suppressed by reason of the events of 2014 and 2016. These are not formal or nominal denials; they go to the very heart of whether there was, in substance, an underpayment at all, when it arose, and whether and how it persisted. A witness statement has already been filed on the Claimant's behalf — that of Dennis Munga Njuga, a former colleague — addressing, among other things, the length of probationary periods observed within the Respondent's Mining Department, the salaries paid to comparator employees upon confirmation, and the absence, in his own account, of any clear or consistently applied policy governing the length of the trainee period or the salary adjustment payable upon confirmation. The very fact that the parties have thought it necessary to marshal, and to contemplate leading, oral evidence on these questions is itself telling: it demonstrates that the parties themselves recognise that resolution of the limitation question here is inseparable from resolution of the underlying merits. 22.Fourth, this Court is mindful that a plea of limitation, in the ordinary case, can and often does present a pure point of law well suited to determination by preliminary objection — for instance, where the date of accrual of the cause of action is not in dispute, and it is simply a matter of arithmetic to determine whether the prescribed period has elapsed. That is not this case. Here, the very date on which the cause of action is said to have arisen, and the question whether the injury complained of was a single, closed event in October 2016 or a continuing one persisting to the point of termination in December 2024, are the central and contested factual battlegrounds of the suit itself. To resolve the objection in the Respondent's favour, this Court would have to accept, as an established fact rather than a disputed proposition, the Respondent's characterisation of the October 2016 letter as a voluntary and final settlement of the matter, and reject, without hearing evidence, the Claimant's account of a continuing and unresolved grievance. That is precisely the exercise that Mukisa Biscuit and Oraro v Mbaja forbid at the preliminary objection stage. 23.For these reasons, the Court is satisfied that the Respondent's Notice of Preliminary Objection dated 13th May 2026, though framed as a point of law, in truth invites the Court to resolve disputed questions of fact material to the determination of when the Claimant's cause of action accrued and whether, and until when, the injury complained of was continuing. It does not, therefore, meet the threshold of a pure preliminary objection, and it must fail. The question of limitation, on the facts of this particular case, is not foreclosed by this finding — it remains very much alive and may be determined, on the evidence, at the conclusion of the hearing, or as a preliminary issue framed for determination with the benefit of evidence, should the parties or the Court consider that the appropriate course. What this Ruling decides is only that the question cannot be resolved, at this stage, on the pleadings alone. (iii) The Recurring Practice of Raising Preliminary Objections Bound to Fail 24.This Court considers it necessary to comment, as it has had occasion to do in other matters, on a practice that appears not to be abating in this jurisdiction: the filing of preliminary objections in circumstances where it ought to be apparent, from the very face of the pleadings and from the well-settled principles restated above, that the objection cannot succeed because it does not raise a pure point of law. 25.This is not the first, nor is it likely to be the last, occasion on which this Court has been asked to determine, as a preliminary point, a plea of limitation that is in truth inseparable from a live and substantial factual dispute as to when a cause of action accrued or whether an injury was of a continuing character. The pattern is a familiar one: a respondent, faced with a claim it regards as stale or without merit, reaches for the preliminary objection as what appears, at first blush, to be an expedient and inexpensive route to an early dismissal, without pausing to test whether the objection can, in fact, be argued on the pleadings alone without descending into contested fact. Advocates and litigants owe this Court, and the opposite party, a duty to make that assessment honestly before filing such an objection, and not to leave it to the Court to do so after the parties, and the Court itself, have expended time and resources canvassing an objection that was never capable of success. 26.The effect of this practice on the dispensation of justice is not trivial, and deserves to be spelt out. First, it occasions delay: an interlocutory objection of this kind must ordinarily be canvassed, whether by way of oral argument or, as here, by written submissions filed in accordance with a timetable set by the Court, before the substantive hearing can proceed; where the objection was never going to succeed, that time is, in retrospect, simply lost to both parties and to the Court's own docket, at a time when the resources of this Court are already stretched across a heavy and growing caseload. Second, it occasions unnecessary cost: each party incurs the expense of preparing, filing and arguing submissions and of assembling and paginating authorities — in this matter, running to dozens of pages of attached case law — for an objection that, on a moment's reflection against the Mukisa Biscuit and Oraro v Mbaja tests, could and should have been recognised as unsustainable in that form. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the practice risks bringing about precisely the mischief that Article 159(2)(b) and (d) of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, and the overriding objective that animates modern civil and employment procedure, are designed to guard against — the elevation of technical, threshold skirmishes over the just, expeditious and proportionate resolution of the substantive dispute between the parties. An employee such as the Claimant here, whose grievance has, on his own account, already spanned a decade of internal correspondence before ever reaching this Court, is entitled to have the true merits of that grievance heard and determined without avoidable interlocutory delay occasioned by an objection that was never going to succeed. 27.This Court does not say, and should not be understood to say, that preliminary objections are to be discouraged where they are properly taken; a well-taken preliminary objection, disposing of a suit or a discrete part of it on a true point of law, serves the interests of justice and of judicial economy exactly as it is intended to. What this Court does say is that the decision to raise an objection by way of preliminary point, rather than as a matter to be argued at the close of the evidence, carries with it a responsibility to first test the objection rigorously against the Mukisa Biscuit and Oraro v Mbaja principles; and that where, as here, that testing would have revealed that the objection could not succeed without the Court first resolving contested questions of fact, the objection ought not to have been raised in that form at all. Courts are, increasingly, alive to this practice, and it is not without consequence: where an unmeritorious objection is shown to have been raised without a proper basis, the discretion as to costs — including, in an appropriate case, an order that a party bear the costs thrown away personally, or on a scale reflecting the unmeritorious nature of the objection — remains available to the Court, and litigants and their advocates would do well to bear this in mind before electing to proceed by way of preliminary objection rather than allowing the point to be determined, if it must be, at the trial itself or as a properly framed preliminary issue supported by an agreed statement of facts. (iv) The Undesirable Practice of Filing "Responses" to Preliminary Objections 28.The final matter this Court wishes to address, and which arises directly on the record of this application, is the practice — increasingly encountered, and exemplified in this very matter — of a party opposing a preliminary objection filing a document styled as a "response" to the objection, in addition to, or in place of, written submissions properly so called. 29.In this matter, the Claimant filed both. The "Claimant's Response to the Respondent's Notice of Preliminary Objection" runs to twenty-nine numbered paragraphs, couched in the language and format of a pleading or a further affidavit — "That" this, "That" that — and annexes eleven separate documents, marked KARC-1 through KARC-11, comprising the Claimant's original 2013 contract, his probation and confirmation letters, internal grievance correspondence, comparator payslips and confirmation letters, and other material never previously placed before the Court in the pleadings proper. That document is, notably, unsigned, undated, and unverified by any oath ; it does not purport to be, and could not properly be received as, an affidavit, nor is it a pleading contemplated at this stage of the proceedings, issue having already been joined between the Amended Statement of Claim and the Respondent's Response thereto. Separately, and correctly, the Claimant also filed proper written submissions in opposition to the objection, confined to legal argument on the Mukisa Biscuit and continuing-injury authorities. 30.This duplication is, in this Court's view, both unnecessary and undesirable, and the "Response" ought properly to have been dispensed with altogether. A preliminary objection, as this Ruling has already explained, is by definition confined to a point of law arising on the pleadings as they already stand; it is argued on the assumption, for the purposes of the objection only, that the facts already pleaded by the opposing party are true. It follows, as a matter of principle, that a party resisting a preliminary objection has no occasion, and no proper procedural vehicle, to introduce new facts, new characterisations of old facts, or new documentary annexures in answer to the objection: everything the Court needs to determine whether the objection raises a pure point of law is already before it, in the pleadings filed and closed prior to the objection being raised. What a respondent to a preliminary objection is entitled — and required — to do is submit, by way of argument, either that the objection is correct in law and should be upheld on the facts as pleaded, or that it is not a pure point of law at all because it requires the Court to go beyond the pleadings. Both of those are exercises in legal submission, not in further pleading or further evidence. 31.Permitting, or even tacitly tolerating, a practice of filing "responses" to preliminary objections invites exactly the confusion this application illustrates: a document that reads as an attempt to re-plead, or to bolster, the substantive claim through the back door of an interlocutory objection, introducing eleven annexures that were never pleaded, verified, or tested, weeks or months after the pleadings had already closed, and without leave of the Court to introduce further evidence at that stage. It blurs the line — one which Mukisa Biscuit and Oraro v Mbaja insist must be kept sharp — between argument on a pure point of law and the marshalling of evidence proper to the trial itself. It also creates uncertainty as to what, precisely, the Court is being asked to consider: is it to treat the "Response" as evidence, notwithstanding that it is unsworn and untested; is it to treat it as submissions, notwithstanding that it is not framed as such; or is it to disregard it altogether and confine itself to the properly filed written submissions? None of this uncertainty need arise if the correct and, in this Court's view, the only proper practice is followed: a party wishing to resist a preliminary objection should do so through written (or, where directed, oral) submissions alone, addressing why the objection is not sustainable in law, without purporting to file a further substantive "response" bearing the trappings of a pleading or an affidavit. 32.For completeness, this Court has, in arriving at its determination on the objection itself, had regard only to the pleadings properly on record — namely the Amended Statement of Claim, the Response thereto, and the witness statement already filed — and to the legal submissions filed by both parties. It has not treated the unsworn "Response" and its annexures as evidence, nor could it properly have done so; its relevance to this Ruling is confined to illustrating, concretely, the very practice this Court has thought it necessary to discourage. G. Disposition 33.For the reasons set out above, the Court finds and orders as follows:(a)The Respondent's Notice of Preliminary Objection dated 13th May 2026 does not raise a pure point of law capable of determination without evidence; it requires this Court to resolve disputed questions of fact material to when the Claimant's cause of action accrued and whether, and until when, the injury complained of was of a continuing character. It therefore fails the test in Mukisa Biscuit Manufacturing Co. Ltd v West End Distributors Ltd [1969] EA 696 and Oraro v Mbaja [2005] eKLR, and is accordingly dismissed.(b)The question of limitation raised by the Respondent remains available to be argued at the hearing of the suit, on the evidence, and nothing in this Ruling shall be taken as a determination, one way or the other, of when the Claimant's cause of action in fact accrued or whether the alleged injury was, as a matter of fact, continuing.(c)The costs of the Preliminary Objection shall abide the outcome of the suit.(d)The suit shall proceed to hearing. 34.It is so ordered. DATED SIGNED AND DELIVERED THIS 30TH DAY OF JULY 2026.OCHARO KEBIRAJUDGE