The drive to Kiambu took longer than the distance suggested because morning traffic stalled twice. Musa rode as a passenger. Ruth carried the consortium recall letter and the authority. The clinic property officer had already been notified through the official channel.
The clinic was smaller than Northgate. Its storeroom sat behind the pharmacy inside a steel cage with two locks. Grace, the property officer, met them holding the asset register.
“The unit is unopened,” she said. “But my system has a serial that differs from your letter by one digit.”
“It is scheduled for use at one,” Ruth said. “We need identity confirmed and a replacement arranged first.”
Grace opened the cage under her own inventory procedure. Ruth read the delivery note; Musa compared the PO and dispatch references in the recall file. The model family matched.
The external project sticker read `KM-4417`.
Grace entered it into the manufacturer lookup. Invalid.
“Maybe the hyphen format?” Musa suggested.
She tried again without the hyphen. Still invalid.
“The project sticker may not be the manufacturer serial,” she said.
“Then we do not call it counterfeit. We identify what is underneath.”
Before touching the label, Grace photographed all sides of the unopened box with the clinic device and saved the images into its asset incident record. Ruth documented the supplier seal condition.
Grace then removed the project sticker using a tamper-safe procedure. Beneath it was an older manufacturer label.
The serial was different.
Musa read it aloud. Ruth checked Wanjiku’s certified supplier statement. The underlying serial matched a Blue quotation batch.
“Again,” Ruth said. “State exactly what we know.”
Musa did. “The external project label `KM-4417` was applied over another manufacturer serial. The underlying serial matches the supplier’s Blue batch reference. We have not established a safety defect.”
The clinic manager arrived asking whether the product was fake.
“We do not have evidence of a counterfeit product,” Musa said. “We have evidence of a relabeling and provenance mismatch. Quarantine it until the chain is clarified.”
Grace found a replacement from unaffected stock, with a configuration approved under the contract. The replacement went to the procedure room. The relabeled unit went into quarantine.
The timestamps now mattered. Supplier delivery: Tuesday. Project-sticker print date: Thursday. Meridian dispatch: Friday. Whatever the reason, the relabeling occurred between supplier delivery and Meridian dispatch.
Ruth asked if Meridian used a subcontractor for project stickers. Musa remembered the onboarding process: large-batch assembly sometimes went to an outside labeling workshop.
Grace uploaded the before-removal image, custody sheet, delivery-note excerpt, manufacturer lookup, and quarantine record to the consortium evidence portal. Nothing went onto Musa’s USB because he had none.
The manufacturer lookup confirmed model family and serial; it did not declare the unit defective. Ruth insisted that distinction be written into the custody note.
Grace said the word counterfeit would create urgency.
“Urgency already exists,” Ruth replied. “The unit is quarantined and the clinic has a replacement. We do not need an allegation to act.”
Before they left, Grace added a temporary receiving safeguard: for affected model families, staff would record both the project label and visible manufacturer serial before placing a box in the cage.
Musa saw the practical value of precision. Evidence had changed the clinic’s current process without requiring a dramatic headline.
The old and new labels were sealed in a tamper-evident envelope. The remaining question was operational: who had ordered the relabeling between supplier delivery and Meridian dispatch?
As the new sticker lifted, the old serial appeared beneath it—and Ruth said, “This was changed before it reached Meridian.”