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"speaker_name": "Mr. Raila",
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"legal_name": "Raila Amolo Odinga",
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"content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for the opportunity. First of all, I want to thank the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and his team for doing a very good job. In this Report, Parliament is exercising its function as a watchdog. Outside there, there are a lot of misconceptions about the role of Parliament and a number of people take advantage of this. We find that Members of Parliament are blamed outside there, for responsibilities that are not theirs. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for example, we find that when roads are poor, no medicine in hospitals, problems with the buildings in schools and so on, people outside there, blame the respective Member of Parliament. What is our Member of Parliament doing? He has done nothing for the last four years because of our poor roads. People do not appreciate that the Government consists of three arms which are the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature. The role of Parliament is so clear and known and it is there also in the Constitution; it is to make laws and to act as a watchdog of public funds. So, if roads are poor, it is the Ministry of Roads and Public Works to take the responsibility. If there is a problem with hospitals and dispensaries, we have got a whole Ministry of Health headed by a Minister, a Permanent Secretary and officers at the provincial, district and even divisional level. It is never the role of a Member of Parliament to see that the medical system is working properly. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, these hon. Members of Parliament have done what has been done by this Parliament year in, year out. The PAC of this House has been doing its work very effectively as it should be done. We have reports that have been written exposing misappropriation of public funds and several financial scandals and even going to the extent of recommending that certain individuals be excluded from holding public offices. What has been lacking is the will on the part of the Government to take action as per recommendations of the PAC. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this Report is not different from reports which have been produced and discussed in this House in the past and approved. There has been very little implementation and that is the reason why public officers continue to operate with impunity. I am saying this as somebody who has been an insider and who knows exactly what is happening. When I took over the responsibility of heading the Ministry of Roads and Public Works, I found that the Ministry was very high up in terms of the corruption index in the Government. I appointed two committees. One was to investigate the illegal allocation of Government properties. The second one was to investigate the issue of pending bills in the Ministry. At that time, the pending bills in the Ministry of Roads and Public Works amounted to Kshs7.5 billion. So, I set up a committee headed by Eng. Andrew Kiptoon, who is a very eminent engineer, and with very prominent 618 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES April 12, 2007 personalities in our country. I wanted to put an end to this phenomenon of pending bills. I wanted to get down to the root cause of this. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, once I did this, I found a lot of resistance within the Government system. I found letters coming from the Treasury trying to restrain my hands by telling me that I should not appoint another committee since there is another committee in the Treasury dealing with pending bills. I told them that the committee in the Treasury was merely dealing with figures. It was a committee of laymen in as far engineering was concerned. The committee that I appointed was a committee that was going to do a technical audit of the projects in respect of which pending bills had been raised. It required engineers going down to the field to carry out inspections to satisfy themselves that, in fact, work that had been done was commensurate with the amount of money that was being demanded by the contractors. There was a lot of resistance and I do not want to go into details because I know it will be very embarrassing to the Government. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I was told that I did not have the powers to appoint committees to carry out investigations. I even went on to quote my letter of appointment which gave me powers to appoint people to advise me. I was told that there were no funds for these kind of committees. In the end, I ended up requesting assistance from the Department for International Development (DFID). It was the British Government which eventually gave money to fund that committee. That was the only way that committee was able to do its work. In other words, the system within the Government was resisting the work of that committee. However, the work was being carried out. This committee went round the country, carrying out a technical audit. The report itself was very shocking. Out of the Kshs7.5 billion which was being demanded, it established that only Kshs250 million was actually due and payable. However, on the contrary, the contractors did owe the Government another Kshs2.5 billion in terms of wrongful payments. Those are the facts; that whereas the contractors were demanding Kshs7.5 billion, it was the Government which was owed Kshs2.5 billion in terms of wrongful payments, and that only Kshs250 was owed genuinely to some of those contractors. That was what led me to term some of them as \"cowboy contractors\". Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, pending bills are used to fleece this Government. There is a collusion. It begins first with the officers of the Ministry and then it goes onto the political class, we have the Attorney-General's office and then the Judiciary. That is how the system works. First, around that time, it became much more lucrative for a contractor not to do the job. These contractors had organised themselves in a kind of a cartel where they were actually awarding the contracts to themselves. When a tender is done, there is a collusion. First, they begin with pre- qualification of contractors. Serious competition is eliminated at that level. Once that has been left now, they remain those of that cartel. They agree that there are so many contracts to be awarded. So, they agree that contractor \"A\" will be the lowest in this contract. The next one, they say it will go to contractor \"B\". So, all the other contractors will be put above the other contractors and so on and so forth. It does not matter that they are the lowest in this particular contract because the figures are immaterial. Once they have been awarded the contract, then the real serious business begins. That is when the variation orders come. This is done in a very crafty way. First, the engineers and quantity surveyors leave loopholes within the contract documents, to be used by these contractors to inflate the prices, through variation orders. So, there will be variation orders that will inflate the prices. Once that is done, somewhere along the line, the contractor declares a dispute with the Government. Once this has happened, after a certain period of time, the contractor stops the work, because he is not being paid. There is a collusion also with the Government officers. After 90 days he begins now to apply pending bills and interest begins to accumulate. Within that time, he will have removed his equipment from the site and taken them somewhere else, and replaced them with some dilapidated equipment. So, he continues now to charge the Government for idle equipment, April 12, 2007 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 619 yet, the machinery he has put on site is unserviceable. So, the pending bills will continue to pile up and in the meantime, he is again doing some other jobs elsewhere. So, in the end, you will find that this contractor is demanding three times the original contract sum, for having done only ten or 20 per cent of the work that he was required to do. That is why we had so many projects which were started and unfinished. It was much more lucrative for a contractor to abandon a project, rather than complete it. That is how all these pending bills accumulated. Once the pending bills have accumulated, the contractor will go to court, despite the fact that the contract provides for arbitration. Once he goes go court, the Attorney-General now comes into play. He is supposed to go and defend the Ministry. The Ministry officials will come up with evidence to show that, in fact, this money is not owed, but the Attorney-General will do two things. One, he will either advise the Ministry that this contractor has got a water-tight case against it and, therefore, it should pay him, or he fails to appear in court. If he fails to appear in court, then there will be an ex parte judgement delivered against the Ministry. This is being done deliberately, because the Attorney-General's Chambers is also part of the scheme. The other one is the courts themselves. If the Attorney-General is not party to the scheme, then it is the courts; the Judges or magistrates. So, you will find a situation where a lawyer from the Attorney-General's Office goes to court and says: \"Your Honour, this matter is not properly before the court, because the contract provides for arbitration and the contractor has actually jumped arbitration and come straight to the court. Therefore, we urge, your Honour, to order that this matter be referred back to court.\" The Judge or magistrate will rule that the matter is properly before the court, because he has already been offered his cut in the whole deal. So, you will find that there is a collusion here between the Attorney-General and the courts. So, we need to take a holistic approach when we are dealing with this particular issue. We should not just blame the Government officers. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, Justice Chunga once called me, when I talked about this collusion, and said: \" Bwana Waziri, you are blaming us - not that I am defending corruption in the Judiciary - but I want you to know that in a number of cases, the hands of the Judiciary are tied. This is because most of the times, either the officers from the Office of the Attorney-General have failed to appear in court, in which case, we enter ex parte ruling, or they come and tell us that the matter has been resolved between the parties. So, we just enter a consent judgement.\" I asked him to give me a list of the cases. When I looked at the list, it was shocking. There were about ten cases where the Government had been fleeced over Kshs2.5 billion. I brought this particular matter to the attention of the Attorney-General. So, the point I am raising is that we know exactly what is wrong. The Attorney-General - and I wish he was present in this House - knows exactly what is wrong. Instead of him smiling and laughing all the time, he needs to do something about his own officers. The Office of the Attorney- General is one of the most corrupt offices in this country. When the members of the Judiciary come here, we all give them respect. Mr. Speaker asks us to stand for them. But even after the so-called surgery of the Judiciary, it continues to remain one of the most corrupt judiciaries in Africa. It continues to remain very corrupt, despite the fact that we have continued to increase the salaries of its members. So, something serious needs to be done about the Judiciary and the Office of the Attorney-General, if we want to seriously deal with this issue of corruption. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Ministry of Finance is another one. In this Report, there is a special case about the Customs offices in Loitokitok. Only two weeks ago, I was in Loitokitok---"
}