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{
    "id": 612860,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/612860/?format=api",
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    "content": "staff of the Auditor-General will be recruited by the Public Service Commission (PSC). This, therefore, puts them at the disposal of manipulation and distortion of their work. If the employees of the Auditor-General are recruited by PSC, then they are also subject to transfers by the PSC. So, you will find that a good auditor under the Auditor-General on the heels of a stealing governor, like my governor and his wheelbarrows, when he is about to catch up with them, the governor may influence the PSC to transfer that man from the Office of the Auditor-General to anywhere else so that you frustrate the audit and make it difficult for us to pursue accountability. I want to encourage my brother; the Majority Leader, to re-think those clauses that are in the Auditor-General’s Bill, that are taking away the responsibility of the Auditor-General to recruit and manage his own staff and instead, have his staff managed from elsewhere. This will make it easy for them to be manipulated, which in turn, will make it difficult for them to work. Madam Temporary Speaker, questions of accountability and audit are not about the Government and the opposition; they are about the management of public resources. That is why we constantly stand to demand a level of accountability that makes it possible for everybody to know that when you take public resources and hand over to a governor to manage, he is going to manage them. As he manages them, there must be an independent third party to check if it is managed properly or not. If the third party comes and is walking in the shadow of another force, then it will not work. I like Clause 17, that provides that when we set up an organisation under the Statute and the Constitution, we should allow them to recruit, discipline, dismiss, promote their own staff so that they can have a working environment consistent with what we aim at achieving as a country, free of the challenges that we are experiencing currently. Madam Temporary Speaker, the Bill also provides under Clause 20 and others that I will write and send to the Committee, the acquisition of water sources by the various boards that are being constituted. However, it is completely silent on compensation. If you own land and on it lies a wetland that is then classified under this Bill as a national resource worth protection, the law does not provide how the owner of that resource who has protected it for years will be compensate yet under the Constitution, the owner cannot be dispossessed of the property by the State without prompt and adequate compensation. I want to see an amendment at the Committee Stage that makes it easy where the government identifies one’s property as part of a water resource to compensate you adequately. Clause 24 is the one I mentioned that creates committees and boards for every basin of water. Those basins will be created at the national level. If you go to Nyanza or Kisumu counties, you will have a Nyando Basin Authority, Sondu Miriu Authority, Nyamasaria Basin Authority and others that are operated from Nairobi. Then, what is the role of county governments where the resources are based? Madam Temporary Speaker, there should be no board or committee for every basin operational with the Chairman, board members with the bureaucracy we see. These are things that should be done by a single person on the desk in the department responsible for water services in the county. We have to rethink this. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}