A man harvesting maize on a farm in Galana-Kulalu, Tana River County, on
September 9, 2015. The government’s Galana-Kulalu Food Security Project
was a massive failure. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
Kenyans are accustomed to news of billions gone to waste in
ghost projects. However, there are smaller schemes slowly but steadily
chipping away at taxpayers’ coffers.
The less-known projects are giving stiff competition to their big brothers in the race to bleed taxpayers’ coffers dry.
Less amounts are lost in these smaller projects, but at a high frequency.
SH45 BILLION
The Nation
has analysed Auditor-General Edward Ouko’s reports for 2013 to 2017 and
identified at least 50 projects by State corporations that either never
took off or stalled, with at least Sh45 billion of taxpayers’ money
going down the drain.
Mr Ouko, in his reports for many of the projects traced by the Nation, says the affected State firms and agencies “did not obtain value for money on the expenditure”.
In some instances, documents that would help confirm whether value for money was obtained were not made available for scrutiny.
The
report reveals that most of Sh49.8 billion the government had budgeted
for 39 projects was swallowed up, with little to write home about.
Mr Robert Shaw, a public policy and economy analyst and columnist for the Nation said:
THEFT
“First,
what it shows is that this theft from the State is throughout the whole
of the body politic. It is pervasive. Cumulatively, I would hazard a
guess that if one added the 50 or so (projects) up, factor in an
additional amount for what hasn’t been discovered yet and maybe other
so-called projects then one is likely to have a figure that makes the
dams scams look modest.”
In some cases, donors’ funds also suffered a similar fate, as was seen with the Miti Mingi and Maisha Bora project.
The
project was meant to increase Kenya’s forest cover with sustainable
logging in a country where illegal tree cutting carries the day.
After
receiving Sh2.4 billion, most of which was donated by Finland’s
government, there were just a handful of trees planted with a couple of
saw mills launched.
LOGGING
President
Uhuru Kenyatta last year banned logging countrywide, as Kenya suffers
erratic climate change caused by decreased forest cover.
Government departments also wasted money on unnecessary trips and allowances.
For
example, during the 2016-2017 financial year, the Kenya Maritime
Authority paid its board members Sh5.8 million for attending official
functions.
But when the
Auditor-General dug deeper, he discovered that some of the functions
board members received allowances for were the burial of an unnamed
principal secretary’s relative, a courtesy call on Mombasa Governor
Hassan Joho, a benchmarking trip to Thailand and a number of corporate
social responsibility events.
FOREIGN TRIPS
The
Kenya Maritime Authority also went on to pay another Sh14 million in
allowances for unplanned foreign trips though provisions of the Mwongozo
Act require State agency bosses to strictly stick to work plans
documenting all movements for any given financial year.
Only
a few months earlier, the Kenya Industrial Research and Development
Institute hired a local firm to put up a Sh373 million
leather-processing plant.
Things were looking up for the leather industry.
But by October 2016, that had drastically changed. As it turned out, the firm selected was not qualified for the contract.
Aside
from being registered less than three years before the tender was
floated, the firm went on to subcontract an Italian firm to carry out
the project.
TENDERS
Kenya’s
procurement laws require firms bidding for government tenders to
provide their financial statements for three years before bidding. This
means bidding firms must be at least three years old.
Somehow,
some machines that were to be installed in the processing plant could
not fit in the premises and hence ended up gathering dust in storage
space.
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