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Kenya: You Must Stop Looting, Parliament Tells Govt
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The East African Standard (Nairobi)
23 April 2008
Posted to the web 22 April 2008
Nairobi
Members want the new Government to tighten controls in public expenditure to stop looting of taxpayers' money.
They made the appeal as Parliament began debating four watchdog reports detailing how billions of shillings in public funds were lost in shady transactions.
Assistant ministers Mr Danson Mungatana and Dr Kilemi Mwiria, and MPs Mr Ekwe Ethuro and Mr Abdul Bahari, particularly urged the Treasury to rein in accounting officers who condoned unauthorised spending in their ministries.
The members challenged the Government to check unauthorised expenditure, irregular payments to shady contractors and public procurement to safeguard taxpayers' money.
This emerged as Parliament debated the Public Accounts Committee reports for the financial years 2000/01 to 2003/04, which detailed mega corruption scandals.
In the 2000/01 report, the Government paid Sh1.8 billion for an incomplete project whose initial price was Sh146 million.
In another report, Treasury paid out Sh700 million for the purchase of 300 vehicles for the Office of the President without documentary evidence that the vehicles had been bought.
On unauthorised expenditure, members complained that accounting officers sometimes colluded with unscrupulous contractors to embezzle funds.
Huge court awards
Ethuro cited the 2000 financial year when unauthorised expenditure by ministries doubled to Sh364 million, up from Sh184 million the previous year.
He said this was an avenue for corruption because the funds were used without scrutiny. Bahari warned Treasury that unless it checked the trend, the war on corruption would not be won.
Mungatana proposed that Parliament enact a law to empower the Treasury Permanent Secretary to surcharge accounting officers who overshoot their ministries' budgets.
The Attorney General came under fire from members for alleged poor representation in suits filed against the Government by contractors.
Members said this led to huge court awards against the State.
Ethuro cited a case in which a contractor successfully lodged an Sh11 million claim against the Government in March 21, 2000, over the construction of Kirinyaga District headquarters.
The Government lost the subsequent appeal and ended up paying Sh48 million for breach of contract.
The MP suggested that Government representation in courts be decentralised from the AG's office to allow ministries to set up their legal units to mount defence.
Mungatana said the Government should stop hiring foreign state counsels to defend ministries because it lost funds when such 'hirelings' absconded duty.
The PAC recommended that accounting officers must ensure that all bills are paid within the year they are incurred.
Members complained that recommendations contained in the watchdog reports were often ignored by the Executive.
"The time has come for this House to set up an implementation committee to ensure the reports are not left to gather dust on the shelves," said Kisumu Town West MP, Mr Olago Aluoch.
Nairobi Metropolitan minister, Mr Mutula Kilonzo, assured the House that the days when parliamentary reports were ignored were long gone.
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The PAC recommended that the Ndungu report on irregular land allocations be implemented to allow the Government to repossess public property.
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