In a surprising turn of events, Auditor-General Edward Ouko has absolved Garissa County among other 10 counties from blame over 'unusual' spending in 2017/18 financial year.
This now comes as a sigh of relief for Governor Ali Korane who had recently been exposed for allegedly misappropriating hundreds of millions of tax payers' money on ghost projects.
Among the local leaders who had flagged Korane for investigations is Garissa Township MP Aden Duale. Together with Kiambu, Kitui, Nyeri and Kirinyaga among other counties totalling to 11, Ouko in his report had raised a red flag over unaccounted millions spent on functions that lacked jurisdiction.
Issuing clarification on the alleged misrepresentation of figures, Ouko stated that the audit queries which were flagged by the Senate Public Accounting Committee (PAC) were an issue of “bad reporting”.
“It is just an issue of bad reporting or the information was slotted into a template which was not customised for that particular reporting of the county budget, so you end up with some budget heads from a template of the national government budget. It is not an issue of whether the counties spent money on those items, no,” Ouko stated in his clarification.
Ouko was speaking during the launching event of the 2018 Cyber Security Report in Nairobi.