Scandals
mark Jubilee’s four years in office
PHOTO COURTESY
Corruption has stood out to be Jubilee
government’s greatest undoing. Politicians, private sector and civil society
representatives say corruption has tainted President Uhuru Kenyatta’s
administration. Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) Chairman Philip
Kinisu recently said that besides the Sh791 million that was fraudulently paid
out by the National Youth Service (NYS), the EACC was investigating other
procurement irregularities totaling over Sh761 million. Claims of impropriety
have since escalated from NYS to the Youth Fund where it is believed over Sh180
million was lost to fictitious contracts.
Recently, during his tour of Israel, President Kenyatta said that it was becoming difficult to identify the positives in his government because it is swamped in graft cases. With many corruption scandals, Uhuru in March last year submitted to Parliament a report by the EACC that listed names of top officials implicated in graft. The Cabinet and principal secretaries on the list leading were sacked. As a corrective measure, the Government says Sh2.24 billion of corruptly-acquired money and property has either been frozen or recovered. At least 337 cases related to corruption are in court of which, 68 involve senior officials among them MPs, governors, Cabinet and principal secretaries.
The
President said his government, working with Swiss authorities, had frozen Sh200
million held abroad in connection with the Anglo-Leasing fraud.
“We are working with other friendly governments to ensure that illegally acquired assets hidden in their countries are returned. It doesn’t matter what is acquired with the proceeds of corruption; ultimately, all will be forfeited,” Uhuru said. But the Jubilee government has only given lip-service to the anti-corruption fight.
ANC leader Musalia Mudavadi said the
Jubilee administration inherited a country bubbling with pride and optimism
under a progressive Constitution but has imprinted on it despondency, despair
and hopelessness. “It is amazing how every project that Jubilee has embarked on
is deliberately designed for the embezzlement of public funds. As some of our friends
outside this country have commented; ‘it seems that under the Jubilee
government, corruption is a virtue and a genetic inheritance’,” said Mr
Mudavadi. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Billow Kerrow (Mandera) said
corruption was one of the biggest challenges for the Jubilee administration.
Anti-graft crusader and civil society activist John Githongo said the Jubilee
coalition had raided public coffers with industrial efficiency. See also:
Increased funding for education a plus for Jubilee
“We are witnessing
corruption on a mega scale and there are signs that graft is the way of this regime,”
he said.
FROM K24 & THE PEOPLE DAILY UHURU KENYATTA HAS NOW TAKEN OVER NTV/ THE DAILY NATION!!!
Over the years Kenya has enjoyed the pride of describing itself as the sole media democratic nation in Eastern Africa but could the atmosphere e changing? Is the Jubilee government clamping down on the freedom of the citizen to get accurate information. I will tell you yes and this is why...
Former Nation Media Group Manager, Dennis Galava, has filed an explosive affidavit revealing details about how the Jubilee Government has been choking, bribing and manipulating Nation Media over the past 3 years.
Former Nation Media Group Manager, Dennis Galava, has filed an explosive affidavit revealing details about how the Jubilee Government has been choking, bribing and manipulating Nation Media over the past 3 years.
In an affidavit filed before the Labour and Employment Relations Court on Monday, Galava, through his lawyers, Kemboy and Company Advocates, said Nation Media is a Jubilee Government department since State House has pocketed top managers of East Africa’s biggest media house.
Galava, who was sacked like a dog in January after he wrote a hard hitting article bashing President Uhuru Kenyatta, said top NMG managers orchestrated his wrongful dismissal for allegedly violating non-existent editorial procedures.
He accused NMG CEO, Joe Muganda, and Editor in Chief, Tom Mshindi, of having approved the controversial article for publication but when State House roared, he was thrown under the bus by the two managers.Galava, 41, says since he joined Nation
on July 26, 2010, as a Rewrite Editor/ Deputy Managing Editor, he had written many editorials on key issues and at no time was the issue of procedure raised, leading him to conclude that the whole problem lay with the content.
He also said that Muganda and Mshindi have been receiving ‘brown
envelopes’ from State House to portray the Jubilee Government positively especially on corruption scandals like Eurobond, National Youth Service and Coffee scandals.
A case in point is these emails from a time when Tom Mshindi ordered Nation Media Group editors to stop publishing Eurobond stories but most of them told him off. As we show you below 
The mystery of stolen BVR kits
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| PHOTO COURTESY |
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has been facing critisizm for quite some time now by the opposition and is now sitting on a time-bomb after it emerged 74 of its BVR kits and five generators were stolen from its North Rift warehouse.
The details emerged amid revelations that another 200 kits were permanently given to the Ministry of Devolution –
sparking fears that the gadgets are being used for parallel voter listing in the ongoing mass voter registration exercise.
There is a growing number of complaints of Kenyans captured in the IEBC data base as fully registered and probably voted in 2013, but are yet to register for the first time.
Shockingly, there are also cases of different people sharing the same ID numbers in the IEBC system.
The anomalies are raising serious integrity questions about the sanctity of the voter register as Kenya heads to the titanic 2017 polls.
ALSO READ: SAFARICOM GATE SCANDAL
Last week, Wiper Leader Kalonzo Musyoka paraded six people who has experienced the irregularity and raised the red flag the “fraud” could be widespread.
“The
integrity of the ongoing exercise is in serious doubt, just like the integrity of the IEBC itself. We need a thorough audit of the IEBC system to establish how deep this scam runs and who is responsible for it,”
Kalonzo warned in a terse statement.
In its last year’s
report to the bicameral Parliament, IEBC admitted that about 74 BVR kits and five generators worth Sh31, 256,120 were stolen from its North Rift warehouse.
However, the Commission declined to comment on the impact of the kits being in the wrong hands and the scope of investigations.
The 15, 000 the gadgets cost the taxpayer a staggering Sh7.2 billion. Some of the victims of the registration irregularities have said they participated in the NYS youth programme where they underwent
biometric registration.
And in an alarming confession, Public Service Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki admitted some of the kits donated to the Ministry were currently being used in 69 constituencies for the youth
programme.
This however has not alarmed IEBC that described the allegations raised by Cord as “unsubstantiated
and false.”
“It has been
claimed that the commission has employed NYS personnel to carry out such voter registration. There is no iota of truth in the allegations,”
IEBC Chief Executive Officer Ezra Chiloba said.
“The
commission cares for the integrity of the voters register at all times. This is our job and we will continue to do it for the benefit of all Kenyans.”
But this was the same self-justifying attitude of the Isaac Hassan-led team in 2013 before later admitting in a confidential internal report that they indeed bungled the elections.
In the leaked report, IEBC confessed that it went to the hotly-contested polls with a faulty voters register.
The report indicates that some registered voters were left out of the national voters roll and there was more than one final register, which IEBC admits it did not ‘fully
clean.’
“Some
Biometric Voter Registration kits crashed before data was fully backed up. Moreover, no data was recovered,”
the internal audit published after the presidential petition said.
However at the Supreme Court, Hassan put up a strong face and disparagingly referred to Opposition Chief Raila Odinga as a perennial loser.
But the Opposition captain has now stated that he will not allow “another slap on his cheeks”
and sounded an alarm to IEBC to get its acts together.
“Just
register, vote and leave the rest to me – but this
time round, I am not coming to tell you my votes have been stolen,”
Raila has been telling his supporters.
The Xnyaundi blog has established that IEBC charged Sh422, 380 for each of the 200 kits that it fully transferred to the Ministry of Devolution for use in the bio-metric registration of public servants.
This means that the commission netted about Sh84, 476,000 from the transfer. Jubilee’s
tyranny of numbers is under threat and the ruling coalition’s
ability to recapture power
is under threat.
According to statistics released by IEBC, 616,697 voters in Luo-Nyanza alone are eligible for registration this year, followed by 589,306 in Western. Nairobi, the epicenter of Kenyan politics and where Raila beat
President Uhuru Kenyatta hands down in 2013, is expected to net an additional 561, 437 new voters.
Uhuru’s Central
backyard comes fourth at 538,433, followed by the Coast region at 512,285.
A midst all this the big question is where are the BVR kits and what are they going to be used for?
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