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{
    "id": 549748,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/549748/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 279,
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    "content": "requirement. That is not true because from the Rules and Business Committee (RBC) where we process work and business for this House, this Bill arrived only last week. For a Bill as critical as this to arrive a week or two to the deadline, that simply means that the Senate is being called upon to act as a rubberstamp. This is because we are denying Members of this august House an opportunity to scrutinise the Bill in great detail and, where possible, seek professional advice and conduct public hearings that will bring on board the principle of public participation. That notwithstanding, the Bill is here and we will go through it. I believe, even if the time is tight to prepare appropriate amendments, we have the opportunity to make sense of the law that we want to pass. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, audit of public finances in this country is one of our weakest links in our public management. Every year, when the previous Controller and Auditor-General now the Auditor-General releases their report, it is like a crime novel. You will see very detailed and hair-raising descriptions of misapplication of funds, fraud, outright theft and looting of public resources. However, constantly the office of the Auditor-General has been overwhelmed by work and we have been reduced to what my distinguished colleague called “morticians or pathologists” carrying out postmortems of frauds. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, you have seen certain cases going on in the criminal courts. Today, persons who left public offices 10 or 15 years ago are being arraigned in court for transgressions of public confidence that they committed when they were in office. In fact, some have left us on account of old age before issues of accountability while they were in office are dealt with. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, in this new law we are proposing we have an opportunity to correct the wrongs. You may recall when the previous governments, in a bid to split and weaken the office of the Controller and Auditor-General, set up something called Controller and Auditor-General (Corporations) so that the Office could not audit public corporations that had become gravy trains for well-connected persons. Now, we have an opportunity to consolidate the law, remove all the leakages and make sure that public funds are accounted for and those who fail to account for them are appropriately acted upon in accordance with law. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, in this country, if you look at the history right from Independence, you will find that persons who are super rich have at one time held public offices. Persons who have been given positions of responsibility, trust and confidence have ended up becoming the owners of this country; be it theft of public land or flawed processes of procurement that give advantage to people in offices. We have lost the opportunity to hold people to account. In the end, public resources have ended up in private pockets and hands. It is the same persons who loot public funds and resources that go around obscenely displaying wealth in harambees and other donations that make little sense to many of us. Over the weekend, you saw the President and his Deputy contributing a whopping Kshs7 million to a harambee. Obviously, those are proceeds of corruption. This is because---"
}