By Joshua Nyamori
(Joshua Nyamori is a lawyer, social-economist, social justice activist and a former Student leader at Maseno University)
I have always maintained that the DCI lacks the technical capacity to investigate complex, multi-agency and integrated internationally financed development programs.
The best it can do is to ignorantly interfere, cause confusion and even sabotage the programs. A case in point is the Kisumu Urban Project (KUP).
Although I am not in the project anymore, I am reliably informed that the financier released Sh1 billion to the National Treasury for payment of contractors sometimes last year.
The National Treasury forwarded the same to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. The Ministry then forwarded this money to the City of Kisumu in December 2018, but to a wrong account.
The City of Kisumu runs two KUP bank accounts: (1) Cash Advance Account (CAA) at KCB for making small cash related administrative payments; and (2) Project Advance Account (PAA) at DTB for making payments to contractors.
Rather than sending the money to PAA, the Ministry erroneously sent it to CAA. The City of Kisumu, in its wisdom and abundance of caution, notifies the relevant authorities in the Ministry, Treasury and AFD and initiates return of money to the Ministry so that it is channelled to the right Account (CAA) at DTB.
Someone flags the transaction and DCI officers not only plunge into the City of Kisumu with a flurry of interrogations but also move to freeze the KUP accounts as it blows up the matter in the media as “possible money laundering” and says it is investigating “loss of Sh1 billion”.
Time bound projects have been ground to a halt. Contractors who have been waiting for payment since December 2018 cannot access the same despite delivering on milestones. The DCI has not charged anyone in court.
The situation is that having found nothing substantial on the Sh1 billion, the DCI officers are now engaged in a wild goose chase speculatively interrogating anything and anyone they meet along the corridor.
The KUP accounts are audited by PWC before every successive tranche is released by AFD. The DCI should have, in my view, sought the opinion of the auditors on the strengths and weaknesses of the project’s financial systems and where they could focus on before ignorantly rummaging through thousands of papers that they have little knowledge and expertise on.
Even as they do their investigations, unrelated individual projects should not be halted and contractors who have worked should be paid their dues.
KUP is a fairly complex project that faced a lot of challenges in the initial phases but had picked up to run well.
If the DCI is not stopped, there is a real possibility that ongoing schools, roads and health facilities may not be completed before the end of the project period. Yet to be started market constructions may never begin in the circumstances.
Meanwhile, the loan from AFD is earning interest that Kenyans will pay. Kenyans will also have to pay for the unnecessary idle plant time, variations and other consequential bills that the contractors will claim as per their contracts and traditions in such projects.
The government should either build specialized capacity in DCI on investigating internationally financed projects or establish a completely different agency with the capacity to understand and interpret the intricate donor-funded project processes.
The ordinary policemen will just interfere, cause confusion and compromise projects without ultimately achieving anything substantive, even where they could.
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