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"content": "resources leads to the improvement of the quality of lives for the Kenyan people and hence, to development and social progress. The second thing that I want to touch on is another historical aspect of pending bills and that is the misunderstanding, misinterpretation and misuse of variation orders. These orders are either, misunderstood, misinterpreted or misused in the Government and also by the private sector which renders services to the Government. In road construction, for example, or in any construction for that matter, depending on the length of time a project takes, there will always be a tendency over time for a contractor working either for the Government or the private sector to request a variation order occasioned by unexpected rise in prices of construction items or at times the introduction of certain taxes which were never envisaged before. In that regard, variation orders can be verified and justified but again, rules of contracts specify the extent or percentage to which variation orders are allowed. When they go beyond those expected percentages, they need particular attention. In the Government, the relationship between the Government and service providers has always suffered the historical problem of variation orders being misused or misinterpreted. Misused in the first place because certain service providers enter or demand variation orders unjustifiably and then go ahead to demand their being implemented through under-hand means or at times, to be more precise, through corruption. These are the issues that we discovered when we were in the Pending Bills Committee or the Cabinet Committee on Corruption. It means, therefore, that we should put in place, institutions and processes that can guard against the misinterpretation or misuse of variation orders. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if you read our present Constitution carefully, you will find that those institutions are now in place or should be in place and with a careful watch of this House and the effective performance of Departmental Committee, we should be able to deal with this problem. I am not saying in any way that this problem can be done away with completely, but we should put in place checks and balances and institutional procedures, rules and regulations that minimize the misuse or misinterpretation of variation orders. There is also an aspect to misinterpretation of variation order which I would like to point out. When I was the Chairman of the PIC in the mid 1990s, I found out that we, as Members of Parliament, and as civilians sometimes, misunderstand variation orders. Sometimes, we think that any variation order is ipso facto and not genuine. That is not true. I have said that even in law and in proper contractual procedures, especially in the construction industry, variation orders are allowed in a certain percentage and for reasons that are given within a specific project. So, we should not, for that matter, misunderstand variation orders. An understanding of variation orders is, therefore, required when, for example, we are looking audit queries and, therefore, asking civil servants to explain themselves in the two Committees, namely; the PIC and the PAC, regarding variation orders. I want to raise another issue which has been problematic in the PAC and PIC reports, namely; the issue of audit queries. The two very key and important persons in the Government, especially on issues of accountability, are the Auditor-General (Corporations) for the PIC and the Auditor and Controller-General for the PAC. When these two auditors do their work, they submit to the two select Committees of Parliament, namely; the PIC and the PAC, audit queries for them to discuss. They, therefore, bring to the Committees the public servants against whom these audit queries are raised. The aim of giving the public servants the occasion to appear before the two Committees is not to hang them on the nearest tree that they committed"
}