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{
    "id": 936568,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/936568/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 271,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. M. Kajwang'",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13162,
        "legal_name": "Moses Otieno Kajwang'",
        "slug": "moses-otieno-kajwang"
    },
    "content": "Our experience in the County Public Accounts and Investment Committee (CPAIC), where we are required to open up the ‘servers’ or the books of counties, is that we sometimes find that the county governments do not want to be open and transparent with the auditors. They do not want to be open with the auditors who are mandated by the Constitution to confirm that public resources have been applied in a prudent manner. This country has never seen the prosecution of a person who has violated Section 62 of the Public Audit Act. The Public Audit Act states that any person who holds any information and refuses to provide it to an auditor or to any other person who is lawfully authorized to get that information, commits an offence. Subject to conviction, he will be jailed for a number of years, or fined several millions of shillings. The counties that have adopted a much more open approach to governance, and are miles ahead of the requirement of Section 62 of the Public Audit Act. In fact, that particular provision was put there knowing fully well that many governments would want to be opaque; and that many governments would want to treat information as a favor that would be dished out to citizens at the whims and at the mercy of those who are in government. The Senate, particularly the Committee on Information, Communication and Technology (ICT), must start looking at the frameworks that will facilitate openness and bring about transparency. It should come up with an architecture that can be adopted across county governments. Beyond the frameworks that would promote openness, allow me to veer off a little bit, and talk about the frameworks that would also ensure that our county governments are able to operate in a seamless and interoperable manner. The Committee on Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) has been talking about an enterprise architecture that ought to be defined by the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT). In the Fourth Schedule of the Constitution, matters of policy were left to the national Government, and implementation was largely left to county governments. Policy around ICT still lies in the hands of the national Government. The national Government has not responded very well when it comes to integration, frameworks that can allow county governments to talk to each other, and frameworks that can enable integration. They have published a Government enterprise architecture framework, but it is just lying somewhere on a piece of paper. It has not been cascaded across all counties. The county governments must have captured data through certain processes by the time they are publishing it on projects, if they are to undertake their operations in an open and transparent manner; and I am saying that as an ICT profession insider. They must have a procedure through which they aggregate data, put it together and have it in a platform which can be a database or a data warehouse, where it can then be manipulated to produce the kind of information that would be important. That is what would give rise to the kind of open frameworks that Makueni and Elgeyo Marakwet counties are using. It is not just a matter of publishing results or progress. It is about capturing data, defining data sources, having the right technologies that can capture that data, manipulate and convert it into information. To promote openness, there are a lot of things that we can do. We can go for some of these functions, but there are things that we can do locally. We must ensure that we have proper frameworks and enterprise architecture that county governments and county The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}